Global by Design

France became a member of the million domain club with its one-millionth .fr registration on January 11th.
Here are the top six country codes based on registrations:

Germany: 11,120,000
China: 6,035,000
United Kingdom: 6,010,000
Netherlands: 2,545,000
Italy: 1,426,000
United States: 1,300,000

According to my calculations, France would be ranked either 10th or 11th overall, depending on where Switzerland and Australia stand currently. These [...]

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I’ve had Google Analytics installed on this site for some time now, which makes it a great resource for tracking the most popular posts of the year.
So here are the top 10 posts of 2007 based on traffic:

The Best Global Web Sites of 2007
Starbucks CEO on Globalization: Don’t Go Changing This quote from the Starbucks [...]

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As we come to the end of 2007, it is safe to say that Web globalization has evolved from an ancillary activity to a core piece of the marketing puzzle at many companies.
So now it’s time to take a deep breath and take a shot at predicting the future of Web globalization. The following predictions [...]

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For Australia, with a population of just over 20 million, reaching one million domain registrations is pretty impressive.
Says Adrian Kinderis, Managing Director of AusRegistry, the organization in charge of the domain, “Small to medium business owners are responsible for the majority of the .au domain name registrations.”
Here’s the press release.
Also, this rate of growth should [...]

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The Apple iPhone goes on sale today in the UK and Germany.
Awhile back I wondered how Apple would localize its Web keypad, which features the .com button to accelerate the input of URLs. I own an iPhone and really do make use of this button.
So I took a look at the German keypad demo today [...]

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That’s right. According to the latest stats from China’s registry, roughly one million .cn domains were registered between September 1 and October 1.
That brings the grand total to 7.1 million .cn domains that have been registered thus far, and counting.
As country code (ccTLD) registrations go, Germany is number one, with 11.1 million .de registrations. China [...]

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Our latest and greatest map — Country Codes of the World — was published about two weeks ago.
Since then, the response has been pretty amazing. I had a feeling that anyone involved in Web globalization would get a kick out of the map, but I have since discovered that everyone from cartographers to lawyers to [...]

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I recently came across an article I wrote way back in late 2001 about the need for internationalized domain names (IDNs).
You can download the article here.
Back then, I had no idea I would be sitting here in 2007 and there would still be no formal IDN solution available to Web users around the world. I [...]

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As I wrote awhile back, Montenegro has gotten approval for its own top-level country code domain (ccTLD).
The code is .me and should be available for registration early in 2008.
Here is the registry.
And here are a few government Web sites already hosted at .me:

www.gov.me
www.me
www.szr.gov.me

I can imagine a host of very interesting ways to have fun with [...]

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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. To include [...]

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