From Russia, with IDNs
A little more than a year ago, Russia opened up registration for its top-level IDN: рф. Since then, more than 900,000 domains have been registered, making this the most successful …
Russia
The top 10 country codes (and the fall of China)
Verisign published its quarterly industry brief a few weeks ago. In it, the guide includes the top 10 ccTLDs, reprinted below: There are now more than 81 million registered ccTLD domains, which comprise …
World 3.0: Making Sense of a Semi-Global Planet
I received an advance review copy of Pankaj Ghemeawat’s new book World 3.0: Global Prosperity and How to Achieve It. I greatly enjoyed his previous book, Redefining Global Strategy, calling …
Think outside .com: A map of the world’s IDNs
If you’ve been following this blog for awhile, you know I’m a fan of internationalized domain names (IDNs). Over the past year or so, ICANN has approved more than 20 …
The Top 25 Global Web Sites of 2011
I’m pleased to announce the publication of the 2011 Web Globalization Report Card. This year, we reviewed 250 web sites across 25 industries. The web sites represent nearly half of …
Previewing the 2011 Web Globalization Report Card
I’ve begun work on the 7th edition of the Report Card. To produce this report I individually review more than 200 global web sites across more than 20 industries. Needless …
The next Internet revolution will not be in English
This visual depicts about half of the currently approved internationalized domain names (IDNs), positioned over their respective regions. Notice the wide range of scripts over India and the wide range …
If Russians are wary of Cyrillic domains, who’s buying them?
About a year ago, the NY Times ran an article with the headline: Russians Wary of Cyrillic Web Domains. As someone who has long been bullish on the future of …
Amazon’s Kindle goes multilingual
The Kindle 3 was announced last evening. The big news about the device is the price — starting at $139. You could argue that this is the first mass-market e-reader. …
Chinese IDNs have arrived
ICANN gave approval to Chinese IDNs — for China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. This is a significant development — particularly since China was one of the major forces pushing ICANN …
IDN application update: Egypt, Russia, China…
So who’s applied for IDNs so far? According to ICANN, 10 applications (representing five languages) were submitted over the first four days. ICANN won’t announce exactly who applied and for …
Meet the next generation of country codes
So now that the media hype over internationalized domain names (IDNs) has died down, let’s focus on the messy details of what this all means. First of all, we’re not …
IDNs become a presidential issue
Nick Wilsdon at Multilingual Search quotes a Russian news story in which Russia’s president Dmitry Medvedev says “We must do everything we can to make sure that we achieve in …
.FR reaches one million registrations
France became a member of the million domain club with its one-millionth .fr registration on January 11th. Here are the top six country codes based on registrations: Germany: 11,120,000 China: …
It’s a round world after all
I recently finished reading Redefining Global Strategies: Crossing Borders in a World Where Differences Still Matter by Pankaj Ghemawat. This book provides a strong counterpoint to Tom Friedman’s The World …