Address ownership

[wwh]

I was thinking about how Bitcoin's model of tracking ownership and mining could be applied to other electronic assets.  One thing I came up with is unique addresses.  A unique address could be a string such as "bob", "alsdkfjds", or "BigCompany".  Once ownership of an address is established in the block chain the address could be used for a number of things where a unique human understandable name is desired .... replacement for DNS, IP, e-mail, or reputation tracking to name a few.  Having a secure ownership database of addresses without a central authority sounds like a nice idea to me.  I really don't like that I have to put in all my personal information when I buy a DNS name register for an IP address. Is anyone working on a project like this?