Re: try this:
Basically, you decide on a name then reserve .com, .net, and maybe .org which covers most of what normal people deal with. Famous people make the mistake of not covering all the bases, and then some dick comes in and puts a website up with the same name and .org or something. You should see what happened with whitehouse.com and whitehouse.org. A while back the first used to be a porn site, and the second was an anti-Bush site.
Holding two versions each of my name and book title plus some addons costs me something like 90 bucks a year. As yet, I've done nothing with the sites.