Most British web users prefer .uk (says UK registrar)
Nominet, the UK registrar, published the results of a poll that found: More than three-quarters (77%) of British consumers prefer to use a .uk rather than a .com when searching …
Web Globalization
Minimalism in global gateways
A global gateway doesn’t have to be fancy. In fact, it shouldn’t be fancy. It should be as easy to understand as a stop sign. Form and function and nothing …
Global gateways don’t have to be complicated
The Visit Korea tourism web site offers up a global gateway that’s difficult to ignore: I like it. The languages are presented in the native scripts. The user has to …
Translation crowdsourcing is the new black — and you can tweet me on that
Was there any doubt that Twitter would not try to crowdsource its translations? After Facebook proved that it could use volunteers to go from 1 to 100 languages in two …
Job posting: Marketing Manager – Localization
I was contacted recently about a rather interesting and specialized job opening in the globalization space. So I thought I’d throw it open to the readers of this blog. The …
Three rules of global gateway design
It’s been awhile since I’ve written about global gateways — those landing pages and header elements that companies use to direct visitors to localized web sites. I came across one …
Starbucks puts its web site where its growth is
Starbucks may be closing stores in the US, but it’s still growing internationally. According to the Seattle PI: Starbucks recently opened stores in the Czech Republic, Amsterdam and Poland. And …
The best mini-series you’ve probably never seen
The one-line description on Amazon says: Police detective Ronnie Craven investigates the killing of his own daughter and becomes embroiled in a vast conspiracy. Edge of Darkness is a 1985 …
TED is translation-worthy
Earlier this year, TED began recruiting volunteers to translate its recorded presentations, known as TED Talks. It looks like the venture is off to a strong start. According to TED, …
Note to Google Books: Please rotate
I just noticed that the book I wrote several years ago Beyond Borders: Web Globalization Strategies is now up on Google Books. I appears though that Google still has a …
Update on the World’s Number One Starbucks Fan
In 2005, I interviewed a man named Winter, who was on a quest to visit ever Starbucks location on this planet. Four years later, the quest continues. Unfortunately, as documented …
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 …
Why Pay for Translation if You Can Get it for Free?
It was nice to wake up this morning and see this article in the New York Times about the emergence of machine translation and volunteer translation (aka crowdsourcing). These are …
The Rise and Fall of Web Globalization
According to my search on “web globalization” in Google Timeline: I’m not sure I agree with this graph, but those were some heady days back in 2000. From my humble …
How many Fortune 500 companies blog?
Curious to know how many big companies have embraced blogging? 81 of the Fortune 500 This is less than I would have guessed. As a comparison, roughly twice as many …