Adventures in web globalization, since 2002
Imagine if a Brazilian technology company created an online store called Appalachia. And, over the years, Appalachia.com grew to become a global giant, so much so that the company pursued exclusive ownership of the top-level domain Appalachia. So not only …
Thanks to a heads-up from Ali at CircleID, I discovered a new report by Oxford Information Labs (sponsored by the Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries. The Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries (CENTR) gave Oxford Information Labs …
I always enjoy skimming through Mary Meeker’s annual survey of global Internet trends (now via Bond Capital). What follows are a few slides that jumped out at me. Let’s begin with global Internet users. While Europe, North America and South …
Looks like the most recent WordPress Translation Day was a linguistic success. Here are the details from WP Tavern: Events in 35 countries (see map below) 183 new contributors 12 new global translation editors (GTEs) WordPress supports more than 200 …
For the 2019 Web Globalization Report Card, we studied the following 13 enterprise technology websites: Autodesk Cisco Systems DHL FedEx HP Enterprise Huawei IBM Intel Oracle SAP Texas Instruments UPS Xerox Cisco Systems emerged on top this year. It launched …
Another one bites the dust in China (Amazon.cn), expanding upon my previous post on the challenges of succeeding in China. Wall Street Journal: Amazon’s E-Commerce Adventure in China Proved Too Much of a Jungle
I had an OpEd published this week in the Los Angeles Times about the importance of languages — and the slow but steady increase in languages supported by the world’s leading brands… America’s biggest brands are increasingly multilingual
A little more than 15 years ago, I began benchmarking websites for a new report I had in mind, tentatively titled the Web Globalization Report Card. The number one website in the first Report Card was a startup company by the …
Lunar New Year has arrived and, with it, the Chinese New Year (and related Asian New Year celebrations). As I’ve done a few times in the past, I thought I’d feature a few localized web pages from multinationals as they …
In 2008, Google launched a project called Knol. Remember it? It was designed to replace Wikipedia. Google apparently wasn’t happy that so many of its visitors were quickly abandoning it for this nonprofit wealth of information. But Knol died a …
A timely article in The Wall Street Journal (that I only recently got around to reading): “The future’s not here.” American business people once saw China as dynamic, exciting and wide open. Not anymore. To which I ask: When was China ever “wide open?” An excerpt: …
I’m pleased to say that, based on the websites I study regularly, we’ve reached “peak flag.” In other words, at a high level, companies are now beginning to move away from using flags on their websites within their global gateways. …
Wondering what the colors of a flag actually represent? Flag Stories includes an impressive collection, dissection and compilation of the world’s flags into a range of infographics. For instance, you’ll get a see a visual compilation of the elements shared …
Verisign has owned rights to the .com domain for many years, and profited enormously. So it’s no surprise that the company has been eager to see continued profits from language/script-specific equivalents of .com. So it has recently pushed ahead with …
If you are flying the Taiwan flag on your website, consider yourself warned. By China. As I’ve written many times over the past year, China is paying close attention to how multinationals refer to Taiwan on their websites, not just …