Global by Design

Nick Wilsdon at Multilingual Search quotes a Russian news story in which Russia’s president Dmitry Medvedev says “We must do everything we can to make sure that we achieve in the future a Cyrillic Internet domain name — it is a pretty serious thing. It is a symbol of the importance of the Russian language [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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! Pankaj emphasizes [...]

[Read more →]

The fine folks at Multlingual Search have published a report on the state of the search engine markets in more than a dozen countries.
This report is a quick read and, best of all, it’s free. You can download it here.
The most interesting takeaway is something I’ve been writing about on this blog — that while [...]

[Read more →]

Although the country code .SU (Soviet Union) refuses to die, .YU (Yugoslavia) is now history.
As the ICANN blog notes:
With the transition of Serbia and Montenegro to using .RS and .ME comes the task of migrating users from the .YU domain. As we have talked about before, ICANN uses an international standard for determining country codes [...]

[Read more →]

The .su country code domain stands for Soviet Union. It was established in 1990, just before the Soviet Union ceased to exist. And although the Soviet Union is but a memory, .su is alive and well, despite the best efforts of ICANN.
According to this Reuters article, roughly 10,000 .su domains have been registered, including 1,500 [...]

[Read more →]