Heh. I was thinking that the less sites you have, the better. You can always open a new related section on your main site.

However, it'd make sense to have a separate domain for a site about a different topic/industry.

Yeah, the trend for microsites should probably only be reserved for the big brands.

Intersing and I agree, but I wonder about the concept of creating a presence in areas you might not be able to without allowing your brand on another site.

Say for some reason I was interested in getting my brand across to myspacers. It's likely that I would be more successful by creatng a profile in that community and drawing the community to my profile instead of to my main site. I could direct people from my profile to my site if I chose, but I might not ever get any of those people to notice me wihout allowing my brand in their space.

An author who gives away the defning source of information for their book to another site could be attempting to take advantage of the publishers more dominant space in the market.

I do agree with you, but just wondering if you would agree that there can be benfits in giving up a little control over your brand if done in certain ways.

I think it is a good idea to be seen on multiple fronts, but this post was more about how a lack of strategy and thinking about link equity etc. cause people to flat out waste some of their best assets.

After the user activity has come and gone, where do the links point? That is an important thing to consider.

I agree with your concept but disagree with the example. Digg.com gets so very many backlinks that splitting their brand isn't really hurting them. Digg is in the link business and does things like incenting people to link their blog to a digg ref rather than the news article. This gives them a good bit of authority and IMHO allows them to ignore "link authority" considerations and focus on what they think will be best from a human user standpoint. That's the right focus to have I think.