The Hill has an excellent analysis of domain names tied to the 2008 presidential campaign, which have been targeted by speculators. “Many of the political domain names have been bought as investments with the intention of being sold to the potential presidential campaigns,” notes The Hill’s Kelly McCormack. “Other buyers acquired the Web addresses to post endorsements or bash the presidential hopefuls. Either way, the cyberbrigade has hit almost all the presidential hopefuls.”

A bunch of 2008-related names are being for sale through a Blogger site titled Political Domain World, which touts names including condoleezzarice08.com and johnmccain08.net.

What’s a domain worth? It’s difficult to sort out the value of a particular name, and appraisals are often not much help (more on this another time). But a new site called DN Sale Price (link via Domain Editorial) is useful in identifying comparable sales. The site is aggregated from a database of domain sales that have been listed on exchanges or published by sources like Domain Name Journal. You can research sales by keyword and top-level domain.

Hurricane domain names receive lots of traffic and attention if the storm turns out to be powerful, damaging or deadly. As a result, speculators buy up prime hurricane-related domain names almost as soon as the annual list of names is announced by the National Hurricane Center.

HurricaneAlberto.com was registered through Go Daddy’s Domains by Proxy service, which keeps the owner’s identity out of the WHOIS database. The domain resolves to the USA Hurricanes web site, which appears to have captured most of the .com domains for this season’s storm names. HurricaneAlberto.org is owned by the non-profit disaster relief group Friendships Unlimited. The .net domain was registered by “Shadow Inc.” and appears to be for sale.