Global by Design

ICANN announced today that its first full-length IDN has gone live. Here it is: http://وزارة-الأتصالات.مصر Give it a test drive. I just did (on the Mac) and Firefox, Safari, and Chrome all worked fine. Here is Safari: Safari is unique in that it left the URL as is instead of converting it into its “punycode” [...]

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I realize I’m a bit obsessed with country codes. It’s a sickness, I know. After I created the Country Codes of the World map, I began looking at other platforms for the design. And since I own an iPhone, I couldn’t resist creating a custom wallpaper for it. Here are two ccTLD wallpapers for the [...]

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Country code registrars around the world must have been smiling when Bit.ly announced its new enterprise service Bit.ly Pro. For $995 per month a company can leverage Bit.ly’s platform to support its own custom URL. (UPDATE: You can get Bit.ly Pro for free, but with a usage cap and limited feature set; see comments below). [...]

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A few months ago I wrote about the world’s most dangerous country codes. According to security firm McAfee, .cm is the most dangerous ccTLD because people frequently and incorrectly input .cm instead of .com. And they land on bogus web sites designed to capitalize on these mistakes. Well, folks, get ready for another new typo-friendly [...]

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A few weeks back I asked Where is China’s IDN? ICANN not only answered my question about China, but also about a host of additional countries (and territory) that had applied for fast-track IDNs. Here are the most recent IDN (string evaluation) approvals: China (cn): 中國 (traditional); 中国 (simplified) Hong Kong (hk): 香港 Palestinian Territory [...]

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