.EU to offer Greek and Cyrillic support
The European Commission has announced that it will begin supporting domain registration in Greek and Cyrillic characters. This will allow for support of all 23 official EU languages. The EC …
Domain names
The Twitter Domain Rush: Don’t Get “Twit-jacked”
My previous post on Twitter got me thinking about what other companies had registered language-specific domains for their Twitter accounts. Turns out, most companies haven’t even registered Twitter accounts for …
Twitter and Web Globalization
ICANN recently launched its own Twitter feed. And since ICANN is a global organization, it launched more than one language feed — one in English and one in Spanish. http://twitter.com/icann_en …
Want to buy the number 8?
Someone is promoting the sale of a Chinese domain name, shown here. Technically, this domain is represented over the Internet as http://www.xn--45q.ws, which is the ASCII equivalent of the Chinese …
Per capita, Netherlands is the world’s ccTLD leader
The Netherlands, a country with just 16 million people, accounts for more than 3 million ccTLDs. That’s an impressive ratio of people to domains — one ccTLD per 5.3 people …
How many TLDs are there?
I love this visual, via ICANN, a diagram of the world’s top-level domains (TLDs) — all 280 of them. The overwhelming majority of TLDs are country codes, most of which …
Is .NYC the next 212? Or is it the next .LA?
So it’s looking like .NYC may indeed come to fruition. It certainly has its proponents. Paris and Berlin are also pursuing their own domains. But the reason I see .NYC …
.EU: Three years and three million registrations
It’s been nearly three years since .EU went live. Stephane reports that the domain reached 3 million registrations today. Not too bad, considering that .US is still well under two …
IDNs get on the fast track
So with the “father of Internet” and chief Internet evangelist at Google, Vinton Cerf, chairing the latest IDNA working group and ICANN issuing a fast track PDF document, it appears …
The world according to Google
Inspired by our Country Codes of the World map, I developed a smaller version that includes the ccTLDs currently in use by Google for its local search engines. As you …
Will .cn become the new .com?
I recently came across a chart of the most popular domain extensions, compiled by Stephane Van Gelder. Although I keep track of ccTLD registrations for the Country Codes of the …
Watch out ProZ, here comes Google Translation Center
Within the translation industry, ProZ is widely known as the leading public network of freelance translators and buyers of translation services. But here comes Google… According to Blogoscoped, Google is …
DomainUnavailable.me
GoDaddy, the US registrar with rights to the much-hyped .me ccTLD, opened registration to the general public today and it looks like things have not gone all that smoothly. TechCrunch …
The coming gTLD explosion (or not)
ICANN, the folks who manage Internet domains, recently decided to open up the generic top-level domain (gTLD) space to anyone who can afford it and can navigate ICANN’s complex approval …
Changing the face of the Internet — one ccTLD at a time
Simon Johnson, co-founder of Domainer Income, interviewed me by phone recently on our Country Codes of World map. If you’re curious about how the map came to be — as …