Just had a boost on a wet Tuesday morning - a name search on Google has always brought me up fairly quickly - but mainly because I worked on a pretty big website within it's niche.
But having registered www.danthornton.net, and done pretty much nothing with it, I've ended up with the eighth result! Take that, owner of danthornton.com, who said they would consider selling and then never came back to me!
The plan was to use that address to accumulate my many networks and conversations, but I still haven't quite got round to working out exactly how that's going to work. In the meantime, simply redirecting it to my About page has meant that I've got some personal brand presence online that's totally within my control.
And as Jeremiah Owyang pointed out, there can be big impacts on someone's online identity and reputation in some circumstances....