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 IDN by far. I’ve always been quick to stress that…
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 about 40% of all registered domain names. Verisign says ccTLD…
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 it a valuable counterpoint to Tom Friedman’s book The World…
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 IDNs across a range of countries, scripts and languages. I’ve…
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 the Fortune 100 and nearly all of the Interbrand Global…
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 to say, I’ve got a busy month ahead! I’ve already…
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 of Arabic domains. I left off the Latin country code…
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 internationalized domain names (IDNs), I caught a fair amount of…
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. Of course, going truly mass market means going multilingual. Last…
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 to support IDNs. To give you an idea of how…
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 what until each application is successful — which pushes us…
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 about to see the non-Latin equivalent of .com anytime soon.…
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 the future a Cyrillic Internet domain name — it is…
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: 6,035,000 United Kingdom: 6,010,000 Netherlands: 2,545,000 Italy: 1,426,000 United States:…
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 is Flat. While The World is Flat may leave an…