Country Codes of the European Union
I’m pleased to announce a new country codes map, this one devoted to the 27 members of the European Union. The ccTLDs are sized according to population and to the …
How do you type € again?
It’s not easy having an American English keyboard when you frequently need to input characters like è or ä or ç. Or ¥. Or €. Maybe it’s because I switch …
A book day, every day, including Forgetting English
There is a woman who set out to read (and review) a book a day for a year. Not Moby-Dick, mind you. Books of a certain length. And she did …
A fantast.ic new country code
Last week I wrote about the coming of IDNs (internationalized domain names). But IDNs aren’t the only new country codes to keep your eyes on. There is also the occasional …
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 …
ICANN is now accepting IDN applications
It’s now November the 16th in Asia, which means the “Fast Track” has begun. Here’s the process: The Fast Track process is only for ccTLDs and only for those countries …
Eagle over Seattle
Offtopic, I know, but I have to share. This is a photo of an eagle I snapped yesterday. Normally, I’m a second too late for these types of pics. Such …
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 …
The IDN media deluge begins
ICANN has been talking about IDNs for years. For that matter, so have I. So I half-expected a “boy that cried wolf” scenario to play out when ICANN finally did …
Strange Maps: The Book
If you like maps and you haven’t yet discovered the Strange Map blog, I recommend checking it out. It’s oddly addictive. Now there’s a print version — Strange Maps: An …
IDNs coming in 2010. Really.
It’s beginning to feel like Groundhog Day when I read these “IDNs are coming” articles. Here’s one I read this morning about ICANN’s meeting in Seoul, happening now, where the …
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 …
Drudge Report: News from the future?
Am I missing something here? The page title for the Drudge Report is dated 2010. Maybe Drudge is just anxious to usher in a new year…
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 …
We interrupt this blog to congratulate Midge Raymond
Midge, as many of your know, not only runs Byte Level, she writes. Short stories mostly. Lots of short stories. And short stories aren’t exactly where the fast bucks are …