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 …
There is no such thing as a global slogan
Here’s an article that confirms what consumers apparently know but many companies have yet to figure out — that English-language slogans don’t make much sense to people who don’t speak …
I’m flattered that Pentagram would “imitate” my country codes poster
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the saying goes. So I suppose I should have been flattered when I came across four new posters by the esteemed design firm …
Kindle goes international, but not multilingual
The Kindle has gone international, sort of. That is, Amazon is launching a new Kindle outfitted with a radio chip that works in most of the world’s cellular markets (100+) …
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 …
.YU we hardly knew you
It’s funny how top-level domain names (TLDs) outlast the countries they represent. In 2007 I wrote about the end of .YU (Yugoslavia), though it didn’t exactly go away back then. …
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 …
Chinese IME, aka Etch A Sketch
I’m fairly certain that I’m not using the iPhone Chinese IME in the way it was intended.
IDNs on are the “fast track”
Could it be happening? Finally? After all these years? Internationalized domain names at last becoming a reality around the world — and not just in China? It’s looking that way. …
Bit.ly is leaving Libya for the islands
So Bit.ly has launched an even shorter URL: J.mp. You can’t get any shorter than this, at least not until we see single-digital TLDs. I can’t help but wonder if …
North of Norway
This post has absolutely nothing to do with web globalization. You’ve been warned. About two years ago Midge and I took a cruise to Svalbard, a group of islands a …