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The news of Microsoft Office 2010 confirmed what many suspected: Microsoft will be offering a free online version of Office to compete with all of the SaaS suites out there. Thanks to some WHOIS sleuthing by istartedsomething, we now also know where it will reside. Office.com is likely to be the home of the SaaS Microsoft Office.

A few years ago the Unofficial Dreamhost Blog circulated a list of the worst domain names. Domains like therapistfinder.com (Therapist Finder) and molestationnursery.com (Mole Station Nursery) seemed to top the list as the worst of the worst, while penisland.net (Pen Island) had members flocking to the site to see what all the fuss was about.

We cannot stress enough how important it is to choose a good name when you've found it. Below is an updated list of great companies with bizarre names or domains. Consider this a cautionary tale.

You've done the market research. You've built the killer app. Now, all you need is a decent domain name. Preferably a .com. Why? Because the iPhone doesn't have a .net button, for one thing. But finding something short and memorable can be difficult at best. Enter Domain Pigeon, a domain search service that eschews one-at-a-time searches by allowing you to thumb through a laundry list of available domains - including the five-letter .com domains that are still available.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is considering sweeping changes to the way top-level domains (TLDs) are assigned. Under this newly proposed plan, any organization could apply for any top-level domain (ICANN calls these new domain names generic TLDs). Google, for example, could get a .google domain, or Coke products might be found under .coke. If accepted, this would be the most significant modification of the TLD naming system yet.

Update: ICANN just approved these changes.

China's top-level domain has now surpassed .net as the web's third most popular top-level and second most popular country-specific domain, according to a study by VeriSign says the Associated Press. VeriSign said that registrations of .cn domains had surged 23% in the first quarter of this year, and tripled year-over-year. China's domain boom is a sign of the country's growing importance on the web and rapidly expanding Internet user base.

OpenID, a technology that allows users to sign in to new supporting websites through a single trusted ID provider of their choice, is notoriously hard for non-developers to implement and in many cases use. One of the biggest challenges may have been eliminated, however, by the recent release of a new service called MyOpenID for Domains.

The service makes it remarkably easy for anyone to create OpenID accounts through their own domain, using the MyOpenID authentication service.