I am seeing more people every week who have went out and bought a domain that is so similar to another it drives me crazy. When you choose a domain name, you check and you find it in use, just changing it by adding one more letter just bugs me. Is that not like you are trying to tag along on someone elses misfires?

That's exactly what it is, and that's exactly what it's for. You gain traffic due to others mistakes. This is why companies buy domains that are similar to their own. Look for variations of google.com or microsoft as an example.

Usually the people who buy these domains are not marketing them, they just use them to collect the extra traffic, advertisements and whatnot.

This not a good practice. Always choose a unique name which is not co-related with any other site. It is a genuine process to choose a domain name.

It is not possible that you can choose a domain name that it is not related with other site, it is a game of alphabets and people will always to take a benefit of this. if you dont relate to other site, somebody else will purposely choose a domain name that relate with yours

You can play with domain name extensions and in this case you will be able to get much better results and have domain name you need

This could be one of the reason people mostly look for dot com domain name that eliminate somewhat such possibility because people generally will avoid to grab them in different extension by changing the letter.

.com domains are most popular means .com extension has a great value in the market so once you own this extension domain you do not need to change neither domain nor extension.

i have seen some domain names that are owned by the single owner or the organization in all the extensions.

The company that has good brand generally try to acquire most of the extension because it help them for marketing and re-branding.

I think by default, most prospects will type in .com. I wonder what kind of real traffic you could expect from registering misspelled domain names.

if people cant recall the complete url they'll try either .com or their local ccTLD (.co.uk etc)
if people dont type the extension, most browsers will try the ccTLD then the gTLDs in order

It used to be considerable, but in recent years as more n00bs get online, people have tended to entering the domain in the search box rather than address bar

I agree with you. Choose a unique domain name which is short, easy to say and easy to remember. Don't try too hard to insert keywords in your domain name. If will make your domain name both too long and looking similar with other existing domain names.

I agree also-- Seth Godin talks about selecting unique names for branding purposes, and I think the same goes with domain names. If your domain name is the only one like it, it'll crawl straight to the top of search engines.

You should ask Kevin Ham about this. I read that google.cm could have about 5,000 visits/day.