My Kind of Town, and Now Maybe Your Kind of Domain Name

If Amy Rule needs a Hanukkah present for her spouse-mayor, I have a loving idea: buy him an e-mail address, rahm@chicago.com. It will soon be available. But so will barack@chicago.com, forrest@chicago.com, aviva@chicago.com, zambrano@chicago.com, kogan@chicago.com, mellody@chicago.com and a conservative estimate of 25,000 other first names and 88,000 surnames in the Chicago area.

What will the market be? The answer may interweave intriguing notions of scarcity, status and the extent to which self-identity is tied to location. The person most interested sat in a Bridgeport cafe Wednesday morning, discussing the imminent transformation of a prized piece of digital real estate: chicago.com. Josh Metnick, 38, is a bright and self-effacing north suburban native, a techie and an Internet entrepreneur who was writing computer code for a game called Mario’s Pizza by age 9 and cutting seven-figure deals by 24. During his senior year at the University of Illinois, where he majored in finance, he started an Internet service provider with three friends, including Jared Polis, who is now a Colorado congressman. He and two others invested $5,000 each, while Mr. Polis invested $40,000. They sold it four years later for $20 million.