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Anyone who has tried to buy a domain knows that a lot of names have been reserved by domainers who have not built out entire sites on the domains. They are often parked and have little content other than pay per click ads on them.

The reason a lot of domainers like .com is that most browsers default to it. For example, if you type "widget" into your browser address bar, most browsers will redirect you to http://widget.com.

This captures a noteworthy percentage of traffic from internet users that don't understand the difference between the browser address (URL) box (which happens to be quite large and in the top center of most browsers) and the search box (which is often much smaller and in the upper right corner).

I would say that logic isn't limited to just browsers. I'd argue most people default addresses to .com when trying to recall them from memory.
Absolutely true! .com has definitely gotten a lot of mind share. This is a great example of it:

"He pulled up Google News, quickly discovering the culprit. The vice presidential debate between Cheney and Sen. John Edwards was going on, and to defend his record, Cheney told viewers to look at Factcheck.com. Cheney had meant to say Factcheck.org, a site run by the University of Pennsylvania. Factcheck.com was one of Schilling's."

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2...

This is an example of a bad headline for the content. It is not demonstrated how or why ".com" has "allure" in the subtle sense.

The only clue the writer gives is that .com was "one of the first domain name extensions available" so it had a "head start." She then moves on to say domain registrars recommended .coms to customers and the runaway effect made .com the most popular TLD. That is only casually interesting only to a newcomer to the Internet, but merely a reminder of common knowledge to established users.

Purely from a performance perspective, browser & ISP caches are more likely to have the .com TLD cached when compared to a .net, .org, .tv, etc. and hence needn't look it up with the root servers.

This probably results in a performance optimization of .25% to .5% when compared to the entire page being downloaded but none the less ;-)

Another interesting technical fact that I found out when I was doing the research for this article was that prior to 2002, if someone typed a generic term into the address bar, most browsers automatically tacked on the .com extension, adding to the importance of the .com extension.
a lot of browsers still tack on "http://www." and ".com" to a generic term you enter in the address bar. Some of them redirect to a search page, but still.
A few companies (justin.tv, drop.io, del.icio.us) have pulled off not being a dot-com, but this required creativity and great marketing.
And I still can't remember how to get to the delicious site....
Well, delicious.com works these days...
It's been hard. We have some solid .com alternatives for our service, but we did decide to go with the less traditional style with http://bug.gd as our service. So far it doesn't seem to hurt our traffic too much and helps us stand out a bit among tech geeks, but it's hard to say for sure.

But one anecdote (and I'm sure del.icio.us has a dozen), I know PC World magazine wouldn't have misspelled our site as "bug.BD" if we had been a dotcom. (They did get the url right later as bug.gd, even if they got our "product name" wrong.)

I guess the upside is we get a free mention in the next magazine when they correct that.

Fun!

the "new" delicious preview drops that name and uses delicious.com instead. Also, delicious.com redirects to del.icio.us.

also, in the very beginning when I was using delicious I'd type delicious.com instead of del.icio.us. It's just harder to remember a name like that O:p

There are millions of dollars being spent on brand advertising for various domain names - pretty much every one of them ending with .com. That is a powerful marketing machine behind one TLD...