Anyone want to explain Namecoins

[ianbakewell]

I tried to read up on these, but the information is all in geek speak and fragmented.

Any website out there that breaks down how these work?
Friendly client?
Exchanges?

Help a noob understand how to best utilize these.
I love the idea of a distributed DNS, government cant steal your domain name...
 but I need a place like http://www.weusecoins.com/ to explain this.

[lucif]

They provide a DNS-like unreversable records in a form of "garbage" of bitcoin-like block chain. I.e. they write DNS records as "remarks" in transaction script data.

This is the first distributed DNS and it is not ideal.

However they first implemented Merged Mining.

[koin]

I love the idea of a distributed DNS, government cant steal your domain name...

just like bitcoin is the currency used by certain websites (e.g. glbse stock exchange),   namecoin is the currency used by the dot-bit.org project.

namecoin can be used to store key value pairs in the blockchain.

dot-bit.org is one particular way namecoins are used.  to date, it also happens to be the only service that uses namecoins.

as far as exchanges,  there are https://exchange.bitparking.com and btc-e.

here's more info: http://namecoin.info