In his book dot.bomb, The Rise and Fall of dot.com Britain, Rory Cellan-Jones wrote, "Whatever you think of Benjamin Cohen, you have to admire his ability to manipulate the media." And while being the centre of a media circus is not everyone's idea of fun, I love it. Especially when the appetite for a particular story has been created by me.

Ever since my "teenaged dot.com millionaire" days, I've seemed to have an uncanny ability to write a press release and create a barrage of media attention, most of which tends to be on message and completely supportive of whatever my current situation may be. I owe much of my success to positive press, so I'm always happy to repay this debt by appearing on television and radio at short notice, not only to get publicity, but often to give an over-stretched producer an easy story. It is certainly a lesson that every publicity-hungry small business ought to consider.

And it has certainly stood me in good stead in the past month, in the eye of the storm over the ownership of itunes.co.uk. Briefly, this relates to a domain that CyberBritain.com (my holding company) registered in November 2000, three years before Apple launched their iTunes Music Store in America and four years before its UK launch.

The initial story was the David versus Goliath battle between Apple and myself. Apple, after all, initiated the squabble over the domain name by contacting me through their British lawyers, Baker MacKenzie, and applying to Nominet (the issuing authority for UK domain names) to have the domain handed over to them.

A quickly drafted press release led to an interview on BBC Radio 5Live, a piece in the Register, the tech sector's website of record, and an article on Times Online. These in turn spread, I suspect largely by simple cut and paste, into a Press Association story (distributing the basic details to every local and national newspaper in the country, plus radio and TV stations), then to a Reuters lead (giving the story wider international reach) and eventually to articles in the Telegraph, Metro and numerous articles in American-based publications. Put together with the thousands of articles, blogs and discussions on the web, the story clearly caught the public imagination.

When, last month, Nominet ruled that Apple should own the domain, I pre-empted any release from the authority or Apple and made it public that we had lost and were considering our position.

However, the impact wasn't quite big enough (there had been better stories on the day of the ruling), so over the Easter weekend - a notoriously quiet period for news stories - I re-worked the story once again when we had decided to apply for Judicial Review of the Nominet decision and challenge their authority to issue and arbitrate domain names within the UK.

This time, the Press Association led with our story on its news wire, which allowed journalists to include it in the next day's paper, even though it was essentially the same story rehashed for the third time. From my usual side of the media fence, it is interesting to observe how use of a story in one outlet somehow gives it a relevance and currency elsewhere: a Guardian article excited the BBC, who seemed intent on booking me for the day to appear on Radio 4's Today, Radio 5Live, Radio 1 Newsbeat, BBC News 24 and their IT show, Click Online.

It also saw me sitting opposite Krishnan Guru-Murthy on the Channel 4 News, lounging on the sofa with Alistair Stewart on ITV1's London Tonight, talking to the world on CNBC and CNN. The story has found itself in newspapers all over the globe, including a two-page spead in the Evening Standard (which so excited my grandma that she phoned the journalist up to "congratulate" him on the "best article ever"; the fact that he, too, is a Cohen was mere coincidence), a feature in the New York Times, International Hearald Tribune, and even in the Hackney Gazzette. As I write this, I've just been interrupted by a call from a news agency in Israel, so I expect to be popping up elsewhere in the globe soon.

And what do I or my business get out of all this? I hope the attention will prompt the government into action and deal with the anomalies concerning domain names. I've been labelled a "cybersquatter" for occupying my own intellectual property - itunes.co.uk. It's a shame that Nominet have refused to wait for the Judicial Review case to be heard and are due to hand the name over this week.

Benjamin Cohen is the founder of QuickQuid. He will be writing an occasional diary for Times Online on life for a small businessman in the tech sector

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