I frequently see cybersquatters quickly grab the .com domain names of up and coming athletes, musicians, and entertainers. Oftentimes, it happens when sports magazines announce a new class of top recruits or after a great public performance when people buy these names like lotto tickets hoping the athlete/celebrity hits it big and the name presumably becomes valuable.

Melanie Oudin is a 17 year old woman from Marietta, Georgia currently competing in the US Open tennis tournament in Flushing Queens, New York. This afternoon, Oudin won over the pro-American crowd by defeating 13th ranked Nadia Petrova from Russing in three sets, and is now one of the final 8 women competing in the tournament.

I wanted to see when someone tried to capitalize on Oudin’s success by registering the MelanieOudin.com, and I found that her father had registered it back in 2007 – a very smart move! A professional athlete is a brand, and it’s important to protect the brand as early as possible.

With Melanie Oudin’s great performance in the US Open so far, now might be a smart time to add privacy guard to prevent unwanted emails, although DomainTools has already archived the email address by now.

A few weeks ago, I reported on the Miami Dolphins UDRP filing for the domain name Dolphins.com. After a short period of time, the UDRP was suspended, and the Whois information changed, showing the National Football League as the new owner of the domain name. I assumed that the team wanted to use the domain name for their website, rather than their current MiamiDolphins.com domain name.

With the football season set to kick off this coming week, and the Miami Dolphins scheduled to play the Atlanta Falcons on September 13, one would anticipate that now would be a time that Dolphins.com gets considerable type-in traffic. People are looking for rosters, stats, team schedule, tickets, collectibles…etc. Rather than forwarding the domain name to the current website to capture the traffic, the domain name is not resolving – a big mistake. I don’t believe they would have anything to lose whatsoever by forwarding the domain name to the current website.

At the moment, there is a splash page on MiamiDolphins.com that says “the all new Miami Dolphins.com Coming September 8.” Because of the graphic, I can’t tell if they are planning to change the primary url to Dolphins.com or to keep it the same, but I sure hope they decide to use Dolphins.com instead of having it not resolve.