I heard about http://wordoid.com/ here on HN -- it's a wonderful little webapp that lets you generate domain names that "sound natural" in a select list of languages and that (optionally) contain specific words.
In the "more options" you can filter out domains where both .com and .net are unavailable (it would be better to just filter unavailable .coms but it still saves a lot of time).
Personal users are only just starting to get into having a personal URL to hosting their own id and blog etc. and with over 2 billion internet users and only around 140million registered domains, I think attitudes will change quickly. At least for the personal user.
Remember when http://delicious.com was http://del.icio.us When I first saw the product, I thought the name was "icio".
This is why people just go to Google and type in the domain they want. If you're off by a character or two you still get to the site without a 404.
Especially for personal domains, you're going to want to tell them to people. 'Just email me, my address is whatever at richard dot s d o m a dot in.'
It's a huge chore and confuses people. These things are fine when written down, but become unworkable when you decide to go outside and interact with people. (And I don't mean that in a snarky sense - that's exactly the experience I had. It was fine while I was being reclusive and hiding in my study, but when I realised I needed to interact with other living humans outside, it's a liability.)
All other TLDs, including .net, .org, .yourOwnCountry, .someExoticCountry are bad because they have to be mentioned.
I still love erica.biz and have no intentions of switching over to a .com, but there's no question that people assume you have a .com.
Search engines, however, don't care--my site happily gets tens of thousands of visitors per month from Google et.al. and the site ranks well for some very high-volume keywords.
My point is, it sure didn't stop my company from getting hundreds of happy customers, some of whom paid us more than $10,000 per month.