Reality TV Magazine has started playing the Domain name game. Last year, the producers registered all 44 or so semi-finalists on the same day, December 9, after Hollywood Week. All it took was a Whois search to figure out the identities of all the finalists.
This year the producers got smart. It appears that they registered the Top 40 through private domain registrations. Reality TV Magazine has performed whois searches on all the contestants featured so far on Idol. They found that Anna Kearns, Sanjaya Malakar, and Shyamali Malakar all had their names registered as domain names on November 18, 2006, the day after the Hollywood rounds ended. All were registered by Domains by Proxy–a service that hides the identity of the entity registering the domain names.
There are rumors that Anna and Sanjaya have made the Top 40. I expect that, since this can of worms has been opened, there will be more to come…
BTW, there are rumors that the Top 24 have not been chosen yet as I previously reported. I can’t substantiate that rumor at this time.
Idol Forums has a complete list of Idol rumors here.
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Knowing a few names from Hollywood Week (can’t reveal my source), it appears Idol may have registered all of the Hollywood contestants names or those that made it past group day.
Pia RToscano, now thought by spoiler fans at IDF to have been eliminated in Hollywood, was also registered by the same people on the same day. OTOH most of the other names bruited around weren’t, so who knows what’s going on.