Global by Design

The Kindle 3 was announced last evening. The big news about the device is the price — starting at $139. You could argue that this is the first mass-market e-reader. Of course, going truly mass market means going multilingual. Last year, I asked where was Kindle’s support for non-Latin characters. I was happy to find [...]

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ICANN gave approval to Chinese IDNs — for China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. This is a significant development — particularly since China was one of the major forces pushing ICANN to support IDNs. To give you an idea of how these new IDNs are poised to change the Internet as we know it, I’ve overlayed [...]

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So who’s applied for IDNs so far? According to ICANN, 10 applications (representing five languages) were submitted over the first four days. ICANN won’t announce exactly who applied and for what until each application is successful — which pushes us well into 2010. So I’ve had to turn to press reports from the registries to [...]

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So now that the media hype over internationalized domain names (IDNs) has died down, let’s focus on the messy details of what this all means. First of all, we’re not about to see the non-Latin equivalent of .com anytime soon. Certainly not next year. There are several reason for this which I will cover in [...]

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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 [...]

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