How ICANN ought to do its big “reveal”

Oooh, I’m soooo excited.

Today ICANN disclosed that it has set April 30 as the date it plans to reveal all of the applicants for fresh top level domain names. This means that all of the applicants for potentially conflicting strings, along with people like Kevin Murphy and me, will be geeking out on the ICANN web site that Monday.

But ICANN ought to really have some fun with this. Following all, it made the puzzling decision to keep the public updated on how many registrants it had for its application system without revealing how many strings have by now been applied for.

OMG Rod, you’re like such a tease!

Here’s what I’d do, just to keep things interesting:

April 26 – reveal the first digit of the # of applications. I’m betting on a 1 or a 2.
April 27 – reveal the second digit
April 28 – reveal the third digit
April 29 – reveal the fourth digit
April 30 – cite the sizable number of applications and delay it a day
May 1 – reveal the .brand applications
May 2- reveal only those names applied for by Minds + Machines
May 3 – reveal all the IDNS with a secret decoder ring to understand what each one means
May 4 – finally relent and publish the rest of the domains.