Global by Design

We included nine hotel and resort brands in the 2010 Web Globalization Report Card.
The Web Globalization Report Card is an annual benchmark of how effectively companies internationalize and localize their web sites and applications for the world. It is now in its sixth edition.
Of the nine hotel/resort companies studied, the InterContinental Hotels Group emerged on [...]

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Just what the world needs — two more URL shorteners.
Google now has goo.gl.
And Facebook has FB.me.
But Google’s URL jumps out at me because it marks the first instance of Greenland (.gl) being used as a “countryless country code”
That is, the ccTLD is not being used to signify location, but for something totally unrelated.
I’ve compiled a [...]

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For translation crowdsourcing to work, first you need crowds.
And TED, which has been using the crowd to provide translation of its videos, is looking for a few more participants. Here’s a recent blog posting:
Wanted: Translators
The goal of TED’s Open Translation Project is to bring ideas worth spreading to the wider world by offering TEDTalks with [...]

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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 English. In this article, the German publication Spiegel actually asked people what a number of these English slogans meant and only 25% answered correctly.
But hey, [...]

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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 this new URL is a sign that Bit.ly is planning to shift away from its Libyan-dependent domain to one that may be a tad bit more politically [...]

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