Winer is right, and I'm surprised nobody is writing about this or calling much attention to it. There's enormous potential marketing value behind domains like "beatles.music" or "harrypotter.books" or "superman.movies".
With the advertising and reach of companies like Amazon and Google (or even Warner and Sony), I think these new domains have the power to split the web, and potentially turn .com, .net, and .org into something of a ghetto (sorta similar to how .biz and .name might be viewed by Joe Consumer now).
On the other hand, it may well be meaningless. I'm continually surprised to see big companies use facebook.com/[companyname] in their advertising too.
I would say TLDs are very influential.
The Page Rank is high with nissan.com due to its lawsuit with Nissan Motors. They even have a link at the top of their page with information about the lawsuit.
Many tech articles have been written about www.nissan.com. This is more a study about Page Rank, Public Relations and the Streisand Effect than anything.
Their ad [1] says it explicitly: "webmasters rank better in Google with backlinks on Nissan.com". That seem to be against the webmaster guidelines, no?
0. http://www.nissan.com/backlinks.php 1. http://www.nissan.com/images/Backlink.jpg
people search for [nissan.com], so that domain has navigational search demand, which is very likely a factor for google.
people link to nissan.com (yes, they do https://www.google.com/search?q=link%3Awww.nissan.com&pw...) without even checking if it's the right domain (and sometimes out of other reasons than we think, i.e. lawsuits
(CMS also tend to convert every .com pseudo urls into an link, so this is also a factor)
people tend to click on official looking search results, .com looks official.
google prefers what people search, link, click on. so (sadly) .com matters.
But doesn't the current perception of those domains today indicate what we can expect from yet more gratuitous TLDs?
I had almost forgotten about those two TLDs, and can just imagine how a more casual Web user might think of them: not at all.
On the other hand, it may well be meaningless. I'm continually surprised to see big companies use facebook.com/[companyname] in their advertising too.
I find that to be a more disturbing trend.
Yes - it matters greatly! Domains are used to define a number of critical Internet policies. Cookie policies are one example where subdomain interactions can confuse even seasoned veterans.