That 300-most-common-words meme sure has legs. Paul Hoffman's using it to prove the failure of ICANN's new top-level domains.
The "common knowledge" is that the new TLDs (.biz, .info, and so on) have been pretty much of a failure for the TLD owners because the only people who have registered in them are trademark holders or domain name squatters. You almost never see any of the new TLDs being used on the net.
To test out this hypothesis, I wanted to see if they were being used for easy-to-find web sites. I took the list of the 300 most commonly-used words in English (found here) and searched for them on Google. I went ten pages deep on each search, grabbing every URL Google gave me. Of these 3000-odd URLs, exactly two of them used a new TLD: aaronland.info and www.nic.name. I assume that the latter came up on searching for the word "name", so it is almost not even countable.
(Thanks, Paul!)
