Global by Design

The European Commission has announced that it will begin supporting domain registration in Greek and Cyrillic characters. This will allow for support of all 23 official EU languages.
The EC hasn’t announced when registrations will be possible. I took a stab at registering a Cyrillic domain name and got an “invalid domain” error. My guess is [...]

[Read more →]

Bit.ly, the URL shortener now used by Twitter, is not the first company to craft its name out of a county code top-level domain (ccTLD).
But Bit.ly does appear to be the first company to do so with the Libyan ccTLD.
As some have speculated, Bit.ly could put itself into a precarious position should it begin hosting [...]

[Read more →]

My previous post on Twitter got me thinking about what other companies had registered language-specific domains for their Twitter accounts.
Turns out, most companies haven’t even registered Twitter accounts for their primary brands.
Like who?
Apple, for one.
Here we have someone who apparently likes apples but isn’t Apple:

It appear that Microsoft reserved its account early on, though nothing [...]

[Read more →]

ICANN recently launched its own Twitter feed. And since ICANN is a global organization, it launched more than one language feed — one in English and one in Spanish.
http://twitter.com/icann_en
http://twitter.com/icann_es
This is not the most scalable solution. And I’m not trying to pick on Twitter; the issue effects any multinational company or organization.
For instance, let’s say ICANN [...]

[Read more →]

Someone is promoting the sale of a Chinese domain name, shown here. Technically, this domain is represented over the Internet as http://www.xn--45q.ws, which is the ASCII equivalent of the Chinese character — the DNS is still ASCII-only.
In China, the number 8 one of the best numbers to have on [...]

[Read more →]