Global by Design

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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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The Netherlands, a country with just 16 million people, accounts for more than 3 million ccTLDs.
That’s an impressive ratio of people to domains — one ccTLD per 5.3 people — and it the highest ratio of any country with more than five million residents.
Germany comes in a close second, with a ratio of roughly one [...]

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I love this visual, via ICANN, a diagram of the world’s top-level domains (TLDs) — all 280 of them.

The overwhelming majority of TLDs are country codes, most of which are included in the poster I published about a year ago.
Looking ahead, I would expect the “g” domains to multiply in number. These generic TLDs include [...]

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So it’s looking like .NYC may indeed come to fruition.
It certainly has its proponents.
Paris and Berlin are also pursuing their own domains. But the reason I see .NYC gaining traction is that the proposed registrar dotNYC is promising to return a percentage of revenues to the city — and what city is going to turn [...]

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It’s been nearly three years since .EU went live.
Stephane reports that the domain reached 3 million registrations today. Not too bad, considering that .US is still well under two million.
So who’s using this domain? Amazon is using it as a European placeholder; you can test it here.
BMW uses it only as a redirect domain. The [...]

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So with the “father of Internet” and chief Internet evangelist at Google, Vinton Cerf, chairing the latest IDNA working group and ICANN issuing a fast track PDF document, it appears that we’re really truly absolutely going to see IDNs come to light in 2009.
I think.
I first covered the “coming” of IDNs in 2000. Little did [...]

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Inspired by our Country Codes of the World map, I developed a smaller version that includes the ccTLDs currently in use by Google for its local search engines.
As you can see here, Google has quite a few ccTLDs in use — more than 160, including Andorra, Kenya, Ukraine, and Ghana.
Why did I pick Google?
Because I [...]

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I recently came across a chart of the most popular domain extensions, compiled by Stephane Van Gelder. Although I keep track of ccTLD registrations for the Country Codes of the World map, Stephane tracks all domains, including .com, .net., etc. And when I saw it I got to thinking…
Here’s a screen grab of the figures [...]

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