In Tuesday night's US vice-presidential debate Dick Cheney made rather an unfortunate slip of the tongue. Instead of directing people to factcheck.org, a non-partisan site run by a US university, he urged people to visit factcheck.com, a commercial site registered in the Cayman Islands. The domain owners were unable to cope with the deluge of hits - more than 100 a second - so redirected it to the website of billionaire George Soros, a leading critic of Bush and Cheney.

Three PR lessons from this:

1) Make sure your spokesperson is well briefed and cites the right web address/phone number in any interview.
2) If you're setting up a website then buy up as many of the similar domains (.info, .biz, .org.uk, .me) as are available or you can afford. Also look at commonplace mispellings.
3) If you're going to promote your website in a very high-profile way then make sure your infrastructure can cope with the extra traffic that might be generated.