Global by Design

Over the past six months, Twitter went from mostly serving people based inside the US to mostly serving people based outside of the US. Today, 60% of Twitter’s 105 million registered users are based outside of the United States. And half of all tweets are in a language other than English. This is a remarkable trend, [...]

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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 executive thinking We have to be in Brazil and Russia and China and India yesterday! [...]

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Earlier this year I developed the Map of the World Wide Web, shown here: This map was designed to fit on a cubicle wall and include the major country code top level domains (ccTLDs) that a global Webmaster may encounter. And although the map includes a whopping 180 ccTLDs, that is not all of them. [...]

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SDL today released its “World Language League Table” which lists the languages that SDL has been most frequently translating. The company says it translates more than a billion words each year into more than 150 languages. Here are then 10 most-popular languages this year: 1. Canadian French 2. Spanish 3. French 4. German 5. Italian [...]

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When you work in this industry for awhile, you get pretty familiar with country codes such as .de for Germany or .cn for China. But there are simply too many country codes to memorize them all. Which is what drove me to develop the Map of the World Wide Web. This map aligns country codes [...]

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