What Domain Variants do you buy?

[MTUser]

Here is a very helpful Matt Cutts video on hyphens and underscores. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQcSFsQyct8

He confirms that Google see a hyphen as a separator, and does not penalize a domain for having a hyphenated name. I've bought hyphen domains when the .com wasn't available. I've also bought them when it improves the readability or ease of typing by breaking up a 3 key word domain.

[KenW3]

Some opinions on hyphens are left over from back when computers (and search engines) could not parse words as easily. There was a benefit, years back, for SEO by separating words. As parsers and computers and algothithms have gotten faster and more intelligent, hyphens and underscores are no longer needed to separate keywords in an SLD. Those webmasters I've run across that prefer the hyphens are usually old-school with significant experience.

For names, I want the dot com and will register the net and org to control a name. That's it for the gTLDs (for me). I don't bother with ccTLDs unless there's an international market I want to reach.