Earlier this week a good friend of mine from Rotman, Frank Luengo, launched his own blog called Frank’s Vault.

Given that he has used the same theme as I have here, I like to think it was inspired by ATC :) But whatever the case may be, his mission is: “…to simplify the complicated, and to bring Bay Street and Main Street a little closer together.” In other words, it’s a finance blog. And I’m really enjoying it so far.

Last summer Frank told me that he was thinking about starting this and so I’m thrilled that he finally decided to do it. I’ve talked many times before about the benefits of personal blogging, and so I won’t repeat them here. But I did want to mention one other thing. When Frank told me he launched, one of the first things I did was congratulate him on claiming frankluengo.com.

And I did that because I’m a big proponent of owning your firstnamelastname.com. I look at internet domains as virtual real estate and I, therefore, look at firstnamelastname.com as your own piece of branded real estate on the internet. If you don’t buy it up, somebody else will. That’s obviously why I own brandondonnelly.com and why I host ATC on it.

But since I’m such a believer in real estate – both the offline and online varietals – I actually own many others. I also own brandondonnelly.co, brandondonnelly.ca, and brandondonnelly.me. The latter one links to my tumblog, and the first 2 just redirect to this site. I don’t derive much utility from having all these URLs, but I just want them so that nobody else can get them.

So if you haven’t yet thought about it, I would encourage you to think about claiming your own piece of real estate on the internet. I use Namecheap.com to buy my domains, but there are many others out there.