In 2002, I launched this blog.
It was the first blog devoted to web globalization. In fact, I don’t believe there were any blogs devoted to translation either at that point in time. So I really wasn’t sure where this whole blog thing would lead me. Perhaps I’d lose interest along the way.
Evidently, I didn’t, for today marks blog post #1,000.
I’m not the most prolific blogger to be sure (and I relied on a handful of guest articles along the way).
But it has been an exciting journey. I took a few minutes to page through the archives and I’ve included below a number of posts that jumped out at me (NOTE: a lot of the news links are broken):
- There is No Such Thing as “Rest of World” (2003)
- Pull-Down Menus Are A Global Problem (2004)
- 120 Million Internet Users In China in 2005 (FYI: There are now more than 400 million Chinese Internet users)
- eBay Going Global: International Revenues Rule (2007)
- The Localization of iPhone (2007)
- The end of translation as we know it (2007)
- Is Facebook “translation worthy” or just plain cheap? (2008)
- Google Translate is growing up
- Flags and languages don’t mix (2008)
- Google international revenues surpass domestic (2008)
- Will Facebook become the world’s largest translation platform? (2008)
- Twitter and Web Globalization (2009)
- Google Translate: Now in 51 languages (2009)
- Translation crowdsourcing is the new black — and you can tweet me on that (2009)
In 2002, China had fewer than 100 million Internet users. Machine translation was more of a punchline than a business tool. And at the time you could count on one hand the number of web sites that supported 40 or more languages. Today, there are more than 23 such web sites.
I also took a stroll through Google Analytics. Though I didn’t have analytics in place during the early years, here are the three most popular blogs since 2005:
- Starbucks CEO on Globalization: Don’t Go Changing
- Google and the Global Traveler
- Google vs. Baidu: A User Experience Analysis
Thanks for reading over the years — and all your input and comments!
