Global by Design

It was just over a year ago that Facebook started localizing itself for the world. As I noted then, the company utilized crowdsourcing to spur its translation efforts. And though volunteers aren’t the only people translating content, a year later, Facebook has done an impressive job of going global. Om Malik recently reported some key [...]

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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 [...]

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I recently finished reading Redefining Global Strategies: Crossing Borders in a World Where Differences Still Matter by Pankaj Ghemawat. This book provides a strong counterpoint to Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat. While The World is Flat may leave an executive thinking We have to be in Brazil and Russia and China and India yesterday! [...]

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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. [...]

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When you work in this industry for awhile, you get pretty familiar with country codes such as .de for Germany or .cn for China. But there are simply too many country codes to memorize them all. Which is what drove me to develop the Map of the World Wide Web. This map aligns country codes [...]

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