The EC hasn’t announced when registrations will be possible. I took a stab at registering a Cyrillic domain name and got an “invalid domain” error. My guess is that we’re looking at FY10 before this becomes a reality — as ICANN is progressing slowly on a formal process for registering IDNs (internationalized domain names).

But the announcement is good news because it gives ICANN another reason to push ahead.

For now, I’d like you to try entering the following text strings into both Bing and Google (to save you time I created pre-loaded hyperlinks):

• Translate I love you: Bing vs. Google
• Translate I love you into Chinese: Bing vs. Google
• How do you say I love you in Italian: Bing vs. Google

Below are screen shots of the first text string in both Bing and Google. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves:

Google, despite its massively powerful translation engine, doesn’t simply answer your translation question. Instead, it provides links.

I realize that this is a relatively minor feature and that it currently only supports a small number of very common text strings, but it’s still a very handy feature for a translation geek such as myself.

Now, I’m not saying Bing is perfect. When it comes to technical searches — or when I just need to look up a Wikipedia article quickly — Google still does better, sometimes far better.

But I’m glad to see Bing integrating translation in an intuitive way. It’s a feature that I’ll be using again.

PS: Here is the blog announcement of this feature from Microsoft Translate team.

Bit.ly, the URL shortener now used by Twitter, is not the first company to craft its name out of a county code top-level domain (ccTLD).

But Bit.ly does appear to be the first company to do so with the Libyan ccTLD.

As some have speculated, Bit.ly could put itself into a precarious position should it begin hosting URLs for the adult industry, or any other industry that violates Libyan laws. It’s always important to keep in mind that a company can’t “own” a domain the way it owns real estate.

But this is all just speculation. The registrar Libyan Spider clearly is hoping to capitalize on all the “ly” permutations of a word or brand name. And the fact of the matter is that more and more countries are viewing their country codes as profit centers.

Which leads me to a brief inventory of the sites that I am aware of that use ccTLDs as part of their names:

• Delicio.us (USA)
• Pdk.to (Tonga)
• Short.LA (Laos)
• fav.or.it (Italy)
• drop.io (British Indian Ocean Territory)
• MyID.is (Iceland)
• Outside.in (India)
• imo.im (Isle of Man)
• Tr.im (Isle of Man)
• Pi.pe (Peru)
• notify.me (Montenegro)
• Rafi.ki (Kiribati)
• Su.pr (Puerto Rico)

I’m rather surprised at the range of countries represented here. Montenegro, by the way, has already sold more than 250,000 domains so far. Not bad for a country that’s less than a few years old.

Any companies that I missed?

UPDATE: Thanks to the commenter below I’ve added Tri.im — and I also came across Pi.pe. Any more I should include?

UPDATE 2: Just added Su.pr — yet another URL shortener.

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 is there. Microsoft does have about a dozen Twitter accounts that do include content.

Coke — someone who drinks Coke, but not the company.

While Pepsi does have a Twitter account.

The Wall Street Journal has an article out about this domain name rush.

So many questions come to mind:

• Will Twitter enforce trademarks for valid holders? Usually, the WIPO does this with domain names, but this isn’t actually a domain name in the traditional sense.
• What percentage of the millions of new Twitter accounts being registered every day simply squatters hoping to make a quick buck? That is, how much of Twitter’s growth actual growth?
• And what about third-party domain marketplaces — will we see them emerge? Or will Twitter start its own marketplace?

In the meantime, if you’re thinking about reserving a Twitter domain, do it now before getting Twit-jacked…

Four years later, the quest continues.

Unfortunately, as documented by the Wall Street Journal, Starbucks is now closing stores faster than Winter can visit them.

In 2005, Winter had visited 4,500 Starbucks stores. Today, his count stands at more than 9,000. And he is now racing to visit those stores scheduled to close, sometimes missing them by a matter of hours.

Winter is single (no surprise there) and lives at home with his parents, who wish he’d just give up this Sysiphean quest.

But I get a kick out of his quest. In this period in our history when so much seems ephemeral, so many trends little more than 15-minute Wharholian blips, it’s nice to see somebody out there, crazy as he may be, sticking with it.

“Pointless though it might it be,” says Winter, who plans to go to the U.K. next week, “a goal is a goal.”

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 launches a Portuguese feed for Brazil. The address would have to read twitter.com/icann_pt_br. Similar challenges arise with French (Canada vs. France). And even the English and Spanish feeds are inherently going to exclude various flavors of the languages.

In addition, if I were wanting to be a pain, I could register icann_ru to beat ICANN to that address. And this highlights a larger emerging issue (and opportunity) as Twitter becomes more corporate and less personal — how to ensure that brand holders have access to their names. I always thought this would be a nice revenue source for Twitter, similar to the way that registries profit from domain registrations.

Ideally, Twitter would allow you to set up one address and then forward language-specific feeds to the subscriber based on their preference — sort of like how language negotiation works now with Web browsers. For instance, if I type in Google.com, the language I get aligns with the language preference of my browser.

But therein lies the challenge of Twitter — it doesn’t just send feeds to a browser. It sends the feeds to browsers and mobile devices and even Twitter apps, like Tweetie, which I use on occasion.

ICANN is now migrating its subscribers from icann_en to icann. No word yet on what will happen with icann_es.

What do you think Twitter should do to solve this issue?

That said, I do wonder how this article is going to be received by the translators of the world who actually expect to be paid for their services.

For example the for-profit, invite-only conference company TED saved about $500,000 using volunteer translators. Clearly TED could have coughed up the money.

I can see this article spurring on CEOs across the land to think that they too can get free translations.

One thing I mentioned awhile back is that you need to be translation-worthy to get away with pro-bono services, particularly if you’re a for-profit company.

Facebook, Google and, now, TED appear to be translation-worthy. But I wouldn’t expect to see, say, General Motors succeeding in this area (though they could certainly use the help).

But the larger issue here is to the extent that volunteer translation for companies that can afford to pay for translation undermines the translation industry. I don’t believe machine translation undermines human translation because companies generally use it to translation text they would never have hired people to do (or they use it as a first pass before bringing on the human translators).

But volunteer translation is different.

Are  volunteer translators taking money away from their colleagues? After all, TED and Google and Facebook certainly can afford to pay. Or are volunteer translators raising awareness for the value of their work, thereby benefiting the translation industry as a whole?

Personally, I think we’re entering a dangerous area where companies that don’t know better are going to think they don’t have to pay for translation. This all reminds me of Seinfeld’s George Costanza’s aversion to parking garages: Why should I pay, when if I apply myself, maybe I could get it for free?

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 your license plate, phone number, etc — because of the way it’s pronounced. But this particular domain is attached to the .WS ccTLD, which is Western Samoa. As ccTLDs go, .WS is not exactly up there with .COM or .CN. So maybe that’s why the owner is promoting it so heavily — I came across this sale via a press release.

I’m not sure I agree with this graph, but those were some heady days back in 2000.

From my humble perch, I’d say web globalization is alive and well. Perhaps searches are going down because more and more people already know what it is — at least that’s how I choose to see it.

And while I’m wasting an evening on Google, here’s one of its newest features, the Wonder Wheel:

It’s nifty, though I’m not sure I would use it more than once. And what the heck is Walmart doing there?

Walmart failed in Germany and Korea and is still bleeding cash in Japan — not exactly what I would call a web globalization success story. Walmart finished in the bottom 10 of The Web Globalization Report Card.

In other Google news, I added Friend Connect to this site — up on the upper right corner. Apparently Google now offers real-time translation of comments, so I’m hoping to give it a spin.

Let me know what you think…

UPDATE: I just removed it. It was really slow in loading. Instead I inserted my Twitter feed. I just noticed that the Chinese characters that were supported just fine in Twitter didn’t make it across into my feed as Unicode. This is interesting because I have WordPress setup for Unicode. I’ll have to do some digging.

Maybe I should have titled this post The Rise and Fall of Wordpress Plugins.

81 of the Fortune 500

This is less than I would have guessed. As a comparison, roughly twice as many companies on the Inc. 500 list have blogs — and I would say this is because smaller companies have fewer lawyers to advise against hosting blogs. Or, it could simply be that smaller companies stand to gain more from blogs than large established brands.

Also interesting is that more of these Fortune 500 companies Twitter than blog.

This data is from a report by Dr. Nora Ganim Barnes, a professor and senior fellow at the Society for New Communications Research.

The report is free and you can download it here.

Key findings include:

• 81 of the Fortune 500 or 16% currently have public-facing blogs. This compares with 39 percent of the Inc. 500; 41 percent of the higher education sector and 57 percent of the nation’s Top 200 charities.
• 28 percent of the Fortune 500’s blogs link to Twitter accounts. (Other Fortune 500 companies have Twitter accounts, but they are not linked to their blogs)
• Five of the top ten companies have public blogs: Wal-Mart, Chevron, General Motors, Ford, and Bank of America.
• 90 percent of the Fortune 500’s blogs have the comments feature enabled.
• The computer software/hardware technology industry has the most blogs, followed by the food and drug industry, financial services,
• Internet services, semi-conductors, retail and automotive respectively.
• Ten percent of the Fortune 500’s blogs link to podcasts; 21 percent incorporate video

This photo arrived courtesy of Gareth Morgan at Neovia Financial.

Apparently the proprietor of this restaurant in China decided to create an English-language sign using machine translation (MT) software and, apparently, the MT engine wasn’t working all that well.

So instead of “restaurant” we have “translate server error.”

It’s certainly one of the more memorable restaurant names I’ve come across. I’ll be sure to look out for it when I visit!

And I’ve love to know which MT engine delivered this message.

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 ccTLD per 6.5 people.

Granted, many of the owners of these .nl domains are not Dutch. Rather, they are multinational companies like FedEx and Apple.

But even if you take this into account, the Dutch registry SIDO claims that the Netherlands still has the highest density of domains, roughly 28 .NL domains per 1,000 people — a still impressive ratio.

Why is this I wonder?

Big mistake.

On a Saturday afternoon one November, I decided to bike over to my office and then back again to figure out the route. I figured I was smart in planning ahead.

But I got a late start, a really late start, and by the time I got to Redmond it was dark. I was freezing, dehydrated, exhausted. And my wife had expected me home an hour ago.

I called her and told her I’d be a “little” late. She offered to come pick me up even though she had no idea where I was and, for the most part, neither did I. I hadn’t actually made it my office — that would have taken another half hour.

So I swallowed what little pride I had left and asked her to come get me. Now, there was just one problem with this situation — she didn’t know where I was. I had my iPhone so I was able to talk her over the bridge and eventually to the gas station where I was making myself home. But it wasn’t a pleasant experience, to put it mildly, and one she will never let me forget.

If I had only had the iPhone app that my brother just developed, things would have gone quite a bit more smoothly. The app allows you to email your current location to someone else so they can map out how to get to you. Simple. Easy. I’ll be sure to have it with me the next time to try biking to work…

You can download here.

Does this icon say “language” to you?

It doesn’t to me.

But the OMC design studio feels so strongly about it that it has launched a web site to promote this icon as a global standard.

I applaud the effort and I fully agree that there is a need for such an icon, but I don’t believe that this one should be it. I find that this looks like a floppy disk (and, yes, I’m aware that there is an entire generation of computer users out there who don’t even know what a floppy disk looks like).

If I were to vote for an international icon, I would vote for a generic globe icon. Companies such as Panasonic, Dow Corning, and Microsoft have used a globe icon to denote either language or country/region (or both).

Other companies use tiny maps, such as John Deere and Caterpillar.

I prefer the globe, but either will do the trick.

What do you think?

PS: I just discovered that I wrote about the need for a standard icon way back in 2004. I preferred the globe icon even back then.

According to the unofficial Google blog, Google has inserted its “translate” link into a number of localized Google sites — such as France and Spain. Google.com is not yet included.

This is just another sign that translation is becoming a core element of Google’s world domination strategy. If you’re curious about Google’s market share around the world — here’s an interesting “crowdsourced” document.

Here is the France home page:

I rarely ever use this pull-down menu and I wonder how many others do. I realize that Google strives to keep an austere home page and this is one solution — but I’m not sure it’s worth it. If users can’t find the translation link they may never use it.

Google Translate is no longer growing up, it’s growing out — integrating itself across all of its many properties.

I’m happy to see Microsoft Research launch this new Web site widget.

I’ll have to test it out on my site when I get the time — and would love to hear from others who have tried it.

A demo site is here.

I really like how the widget creates a more seamless translation experience, which is a big step toward taking machine translation to the masses. I’m looking forward to the day when I no longer have to manually copy and paste URLs into Google Translate and the like.

However, I did get confused initially on figuring out how to return the page back to English. That bar at the top of the page blended in a bit too much at first. I’d like to see a language reset button on the widget itself.

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 stats from Facebook’s global expansion efforts. Among them:

• Facebook is available in 43 languages and is in the process of being translated into another 60 languages.
• 40 percent of Facebook users are not using English.
• 25,000 volunteers helped translate Facebook into Turkish last year, and there are now 9 million Turkish-language users signed up for Facebook.

Even though only 43 languages are available now, if you add the Facebook Translations application (which i really recommend doing if you’re into this sort of thing), you’ll see the other 60 languages in the pipeline — many of which look pretty much good to go.

Here’s what the Translations pull-down menu looks like:

So many languages my computer is lacking for fonts.

It’s a very safe bet to say that Facebook will support more than 100 languages a year from now.

And yet I still ended up getting the Kindle.

It’s thinner than I expected and I really get a kick of how it never is “off” in the conventional sense. When you turn the device off you typically get an illustration of a famous autho.

The interface is usable enough, but there is plenty of room for improvement. It was funny to watch my wife try it for the first time. She touched the screen to select an option — a sign of what the iPhone is doing to us all. I felt the urge to touch the screen as well. This makes me realize that Apple is going to do something just like the Kindle eventually (maybe sooner than later). Perhaps power consumption is the big obstacle. But it’s hard to see any hand-held device not going “touch” in the years ahead.

I LOVE the embedded dictionary. If you set the cursor next to a word you don’t understand, the definition appears at the bottom of the screen. I’m going to learn a lot of words that I was simply too lazy to look up these many years.

But the reason for getting the Kindle wasn’t to expand my vocabulary so much as to save shelf space.

Is it bookworthy?

Since downsizing my life back into an apartment, I’ve realized that I can’t keep acquiring books. I love books. I adore books. But I only have so much room for books. And I don’t like to get rid of them once I’ve acquired them.

I’ve found that I’ve resisted buying books simply because I’m running out of shelf space. With the Kindle I can now read those books that may not be “bookworthy” enough to take up precious space on a shelf.

The good news is that I can continue buying those print books that I can’t live without, my wife’s book included — but it’s nice to have a choice.

I also am now making good use of ManyBooks, an excellent repository of copyright-free books in a number of formats. I don’t think I would have ever purchased White Jacket by Herman Melville, but I just downloaded it.

Moby-Dick is clearly bookworthy, but is every Melville book? The Kindle gives me the opportunity to preview a book before buying the “real” print version. Amazon provides a preview option with books as well.

And, yes, I could have done the same exact thing on my PC, downloading PDF versions of all these classic books. And I have already downloaded a number of books in PDF form. But I just don’t read books on a computer, even a laptop computer. There are too many other distractions — email, news, facebook, this blog!

With the Kindle, all you do, for the most part, is read. And I like that.

The decline of “books”; the rise of “content”

As a writer — one who has a novel of his own that he’d like to see in print form one day — the Kindle is a mixed blessing. I agree that this device and the many to follow represent the future of reading for the generation that doesn’t even get a newspaper delivered to the door each morning (I’m still clinging to my daily New York Times).

I don’t believe the Kindle will eliminate books, perhaps a few mainstream bookstores, but not books.

But I do feel books becoming “content” now that they are digitized, along with music and movies and anything else that will fit on a flash disk. In fact, I don’t even view the books on my Kindle as books. Books are those objects on my shelves, that I’ve dragged with me from city to city — some as long as 30 years (I still have a few Hardy Boys books, even a Nancy Drew).

It’s an odd feeling to be caught between two technologies. The print books were once cutting edge — and now we have the digital equivalent.

I guess in the end all that matters is that people keep reading. And if the Kindle achieves that goal, so be it. I certainly find myself reading a bit more since getting it.

I’m not very patient with games. Which is probably why I’m not very good.

My brother has concocted a tile puzzle game for the iPhone, shown below, that I still haven’t figured out — even at the easiest setting.

Maybe you’ll have better luck than I’ve had. The good news is that Chris has made it available for free here.

What I really like about the app is that you can use your own photos. I thought that my pics would be easier to unscramble than the default pics.

They weren’t.

For anyone out there looking for a great developer — proficient on both the iPhone and the PC — you can contact Chris at  chris@chrisyunker.com.

I haven’t tried it yet. It looks like you have to post PDF files and then link to them to trigger the translation engine — not exactly what I’d call user friendly. But it’s a start..

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 domains such as .biz and .info. ICANN recently opened a call for applications to open gTLDs for governments and corporations.

New gTLDs could include “.coke” and “.paris.” It remains to be seen if companies are willing to put up the cash to get these domains, but I’m fairly certain a good many will.

But for now at least the total number of TLDs stands at 280.

This time last year, Google supported a mere 13 languages, which was in itself not bad.

But I particularly like the minor tweaks made to the site’s interface. As shown below, you can now click on your language to make it one half of a language pair — a welcome alternative to the pull-down menu, which continues to grow.

What I would like to see — and I suspect is less than a year away — is the ability to simply enter a URL and have Google auto-translate that Web site into your language without you having to specify your language. Google should already know this based on your locale setting — or at least let you set that preference ahead of time.

Google Translate can auto-detect the language for you right now — but you have to ask it to do that. Perhaps the processing overhead is such that Google doesn’t want to turn on this feature by default.

So, will Google support 70 or so languages a year from now? I doubt it, given the current economic climate. As Google notes on its blog, these 41 languages already address 98% of all Internet users. I assume that Google will focus less on language expansion and more on integrating Google Translate into its products as well as improving the UI.

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 down extra money these days?

According to the NYPost, “Anthony Van Couvering, CEO of a company called dotNYC, predicted roughly $3 million would flow into city coffers each year by the third year of the domain’s existence.”

This number assumes roughly a million registered domains, renewed annually. For a city of eight million, that may not sound like much, except when you consider that the United States, with 280 million people, has only registered a few million .US domains.

Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who supports the domain, said, “A local business won’t have to outbid a guy in Kansas to get TonysPizza.com. They’ll be able to get TonysPizza.nyc,” Quinn said.

It’s a nice thought, assuming that small businesses want their own .NYC domains. I’m sure many do. But how will the city keep the out-of-town squatters from taking TonysPizza before Tony gets to it?

Of all the city domains, .NYC certainly stands the best chance of succeeding. Perhaps it will become as coveted as 212 once was.

But just to be safe, city council members would be wise to study .LA — offered up in 2006 as a Los Angeles domain (by way of Laos). When’s the last time you visited a .LA Web site?

I’m thrilled to announce that Eastern Washington University Press has just published a short story collection by my wife, Midge Raymond: Forgetting English.

Readers of this blog will certainly appreciate the title of one of Midge’s stories: “Translation Memory.” Midge is the only person I know who can turn an obscure translation term into great drama.

Many of the stories in this collection are award-winners in themselves, having been published in Indiana Review (”First Sunday” received the Indiana Review Prize for Fiction), new south (the title story, “Forgetting English,” received the magazine’s annual fiction award), Bellevue Literary Review, Ontario Review, Roanoke Review, and American Literary Review.

Clearly, I’m a fan of Midge’s writing, so I’ll let a more objective reviewer vouch for her work:

“When you forget English, you might learn to speak the forbidden language of your sister’s Tongan lover — you might find you understand the sweet murmur of the Gentoo and the ecstatic cry of Emperor Penguins. When the man you saved from the sea chooses the icy water a second time, you may bend to the universal posture of grief, recognizing the way your body echoes a bird’s in a wild communion of sorrow. Midge Raymond’s stories are a revelation and a delight, a journey from the frozen desert at the bottom of the world to the lush rainforest of Hawai’i. Prepare yourself to think in Chinese, to start over, to reveal your worst crime and discover you are a stranger to yourself, born again into a world where all things become wondrous and new, terrifying and possible.”
— Melanie Rae Thon, author of First, Body and Sweet Hearts

To download a story excerpt and learn more, visit www.midgeraymond.com.

This was not the first Web site I’ve encountered to offer an international English option — and I’m sure it won’t be the last.

Now what does international English actually look like?

In most cases, it’s American English.

For those who prefer British English, this is not the greatest of trends. But it is a trend. And while Boingo makes it obvious through its language picker, there are many more companies who simply use American English as the default English across all English-speaking markets.

Siemens comes to mind. Not only does this German-based company use American English on its .com page, it also uses American English on its .co.uk page.

I can count on one hand the number of companies that pay to have English translated from American to British or vice versa. And in this financial climate, I may not even need that many fingers.

No.

In the years ahead there will be only one flavor of English on most corporate Web sites — just as there will be only one flavor of Spanish (and maybe even one flavor of French).

One day the media will pick up on this as another sign of the decline of the diversity of languages on this planet.

All I know is that companies are trying to communicate with as much of the world as possible while spending as little as money as possible. And even language is facing cutbacks these days.

And I knew then why he was singing. And I felt like singing too.

Tomorrow at noon a new era begins.

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 same goes for IKEA and Siemens.

So while the jury is still out as to whether .EU will ever live up to the landing page potential of a ccTLD or a .COM, it has certainly proven to be popular. And I still maintain that it makes a great landing page for a European home page.

I’m sure this is an issue not unique to LaCie. The folks who manage the Web site generally sit in a different part of the company from the folks who develop the installation software. So the end result is two different user experiences — and inconsistent experiences at that.

First-time visitors to LaCie.com will encounter this splash global gateway:

I’m not a huge fan of the pull-down menu, but there are also text links positioned underneath the menu for those who’d rather not bother scrolling. Overall, it’s a nice way to welcome people to your Web site — by ensuring that they’ve found their localized content as early as possible in the process.

After purchasing my hard drive, I inserted the CD that shipped with it and this is the first screen I saw;

“ENU” was the folder I needed to open.

But I had to think about it. “English_US” would have been clearer. And what about the other options? Is CHS for Switzerland? Is NLD for the Netherlands? I would assume so, but I can’t imagine that I’m alone in having to think about this. And you really shouldn’t make your customers think about these details.

A simple splash screen — based on the Web design — would have been a much more user-friendly way to present these options.

I want to emphasize that this is a disconnect not unique to LaCie. It has to do with different groups within same company all tackling the same general problem — with different results.

My prediction is that the people who manage global Web sites are going to see their scope widen in the years ahead as they assist other customer-facing parts of the company develop consistent global interfaces. It’s all about consistency these days — easier said than done — but those who do it well truly stand apart.

It hasn’t been easy.

For example, I unsubscribed from the IOGEAR list and they tell me (as shown here) that it’s going to take up for four weeks to get my name off of their list.

Four weeks.

I understand if it takes four weeks to get removed from a print catalog mailing list. Labels have to be printed weeks ahead of time.

But we’re talking email here.

It’s not all that difficult to gather up all the unsubscribes and run a weekly dedupe. Is it?

I encountered one email list recently (which will remain nameless) that claimed a six week grace period.

Six weeks?

Is this going to keep getting worse. Will one day I find that it’s going to take six months to opt out of a mailing list?

I know companies hate to lose email subscribers. Perhaps this delayed removal process is the human equivalent of a clingy ex-girlfriend or boyfriend.

But I’m trying to move on with my life. And they’re not letting me.

Has anyone out there encountered similarly clingy emailers? Or is this just me?

If you look closely at the lower right corner of the screen, the Arabic link is not correctly displayed. I certainly wasn’t looking that closely, but Ben was.

As he noted, the characters are correct, but they’re not joined properly.

Below is what the word should look like and, below it, the characters displayed individually:

Arabic  characters exhibit different forms based on their position within a word. There are four forms, described here.

In the case of United’s in-flight entertainment screen, this is is a big mistake. How did it occur?

Clearly, a proofreader could have helped United avoid this situation altogether.

Technically speaking, it could be that the entertainment system does not support Unicode, which is the best way to go about supporting not only Arabic, but most of the world’s languages. However, the Asian fonts appear to be correctly displayed, which leads me to believe that this is not a technical issue but simply a matter of the Arabic word losing its joining properties at some point during the production process — and nobody ever noticing, until now.

Thanks Ben for the heads up!

This has nothing to do with Web globalization, but it is something that I hope you’ll enjoy.

It is a short story called The Tourist Trail.

As you may remember, I visited Argentina about two years ago. The trip was life changing in many ways and it inspired this story. It is a story about endangered species and the people who are trying to protect them.

I’ve created a PDF version here for free download.  If you like it, please feel free to share it.

FYI: It’s a long short story.  It’s also not a children’s story. There are penguins in it, but there is also adult language.

You can learn more at www.globalizationexecutive.com.

SeaDragon allows you to provide “deep zoom” functionality to visuals featured on your Web site.

To test it out, I uploaded the Country Codes of the World map and in about five minutes had created this…

I’m also happy to see that SeaDragon is now available for the iPhone, which I just downloaded.

I think.

I first covered the “coming” of IDNs in 2000. Little did I know then that it would be such a long process.

Granted, IDNs already exist in the eyes of a number of registrars around the world. You can find an IDN registrar today on this list courtesy of Verisign.

But in the eyes of ICANN, IDNs aren’t yet official.

If you’re interested in the nitty gritty of what these ICANN-approved IDNs are going to look like, check out the fast track document. The document makes it clear that IDNs can only be derived from one script. In other words, we should see no mixing of, say, Latin and Cyrillic characters to create a bogus http://www.pаypal.com/ address (try the link out and see for yourself).

Countries that share a common official language will also need to work together to develop a consistent code table of accepted characters. I can see this being a particularly tricky process, depending on the countries involved.

But the good news here is that the number of obstacles appear to be decreasing in number. There are still some issues to be resolved — like how much money ICANN is going to expect for all this effort.

Will acquiring an IDN cost a registrar the same as a gTLD: $185,000?

Or will the fee be minimal in exchange for some type of revenue share based on registrations? All I do know is that there is demand for a fast-track process and the standards folks are now hashing out the final IDNA document.

Next year could be the year.

Really.

ICANN’s IDN site