It’s not easy having an American English keyboard when you frequently need to input characters like è or ä or ç.

Or ¥. Or €.

Maybe it’s because I switch between Mac and Windows so frequently. Or maybe I’m just too lazy to remember the keyboard shortcuts.

Fortunately, I just discovered: CopyPasteCharacter.com.

Give it a shot and you’ll see how it works.

I’ve got the site bookmarked.

Now I’ll just have to remember where I saved the bookmark. ☺

PS: TypeIt is also a great solution.

Not Moby-Dick, mind you. Books of a certain length.

And she did it.

A book a day for a year.

But she kept going. She’s still reading!

And, as luck would have it, she just read our own Midge Raymond’s book. And she gave it a nice review.

Short story collections are a great fit for someone who has to read a book a day. I’m luck to get through a chapter a week.

PS: Now she has a book coming out!

But IDNs aren’t the only new country codes to keep your eyes on.

There is also the occasional new Latin-based ccTLD.

Like .IC.

The Canary Islands is looking to get a country code to raise its visibility.

That, and also to bring in a few million dollars in registration fees. Just imagine all the Bay Area startups that would relish a funky new combo-ccTLD name.

Plast.ic.

Elast.ic.

Bombast.ic.

Am I sounding a bit sarcast.ic?

Of course, the gap between asking for a ccTLD and actually getting one can be quite significant. First you have to be included in the ISO 3166-1 list of country codes.

According to Wikipedia, here’s how you do it:

Currently 246 countries, territories, or areas of geographical interest are assigned official codes in ISO 3166-1. According to the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency (ISO 3166/MA), the only way to enter a new country name into ISO 3166-1 is to have it registered in one of the following two sources:^[6]

• United Nations Terminology Bulletin Country Names, or
• Country and Region Codes for Statistical Use of the UN Statistics Division.

To be listed in the bulletin Country Names, a country must either be:

• A member country of the United Nations,
• A member of one of its specialized agencies, or
• A party to the Statute of the International Court of Justice.

The list of names in Country and Region Codes for Statistical Use of the UN Statistics Division is based on the bulletin Country Names and other UN sources.

Once a country name or territory name appears in either of these two sources, it will be added to ISO 3166-1 by default.

That last I checked, Canary Islands is not on either of these two lists.

That said, I have a feeling that the Canary Islands will get its wish, although it might take some time. The IC acronym has already been reserved on its behalf and the Islands would not be the first autonymous territory to get its own ccTLD. The rest is just lawyers, lobbying, etc.

It should be as easy to understand as a stop sign. Form and function and nothing else.

You don’t want people getting confused, waiting for animation to load, or just missing it altogether. This happens all the time.

The fashion house Céline sure keeps it simple:

In one page you know exactly what languages the site supports and there is no chance you’ll miss it. I certainly didn’t.

What other global gateways exhibit such minimalism?

Here’s the process:

The Fast Track process is only for ccTLDs and only for those countries with non-Latin official languages.

So if you qualify, get your application ready — that and your $26,000 fee.

And there is a globe in the background — from the Seattle PI building — so I could argue that this post is sorta related to globalization.

PS: I’ve posted a few more pics here.

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 a later post.

What we should see next year are the non-Latin equivalents of country code top-level domains, such as .ru, .cn, .sa. It just so happens that I’ve got a handy map of all ccTLDs here.

Not all ccTLDs will be eligible for a “fast track” ccTLD, just those from countries that have official non-Latin languages.

The two largest countries I would expect to launch IDNs in 2010 are China and Russia.

China has had its IDN ready to go for some time now; the traditional Chinese character version is shown above. The simplified character version is below. The assumption is that both versions will be bundled together.

Below is a screen grab from China’s government web site. Perhaps in 2010 we’ll see “GOV.cn” replaced.

Russia will likely be using this IDN next year:

This IDN is short for “Russian Federation.” Why not just use the equivalent of .RU, you ask? Well, that would give us .ру, which looks entirely too similar to .py (Paraguay).

So there you have it — IDNs for China and Russia, with many more to follow.

So I half-expected a “boy that cried wolf” scenario to play out when ICANN finally did approve IDNs.

That is, ICANN would say “IDNs are coming!” and the media would collectively yawn.

But that’s not what happened.

IDNs have received a media blitz over the past week. Separate articles have appeared in:

WIRED

New York Times

Associated Press

Wall Street Journal

IP Watch

This is a welcome sign for anyone who has to educate co-workers and, more important, upper management to the importance of supporting a truly multilingual Internet.

Granted, it remains to be seen if the intended users of IDNs actually want to use them.

I’m betting they do.

We’ll know much more a year from now.

It’s oddly addictive.

Now there’s a print version — Strange Maps: An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities.

Included within the book is our very own Country Codes of the World map.

I received a copy this week and plan to dive in this weekend. It’s a big book — with more than a hundred maps. One map that jumped out at me was of the Kentucky Bend — a bulbous little chunk of land carved by the Mississippi river and the New Madrid earthquake.

It’s beginning to feel like Groundhog Day when I read these “IDNs are coming” articles.

Here’s one I read this morning about ICANN’s meeting in Seoul, happening now, where the powers that be are expected to approve “fast track” IDNs.

The article notes:

“This is the biggest change technically to the Internet since it was invented 40 years ago,” Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the ICANN board, told reporters, calling it a “fantastically complicated technical feature.” He said he expects the board to grant approval on Friday, the conference’s final day.

Okay, so Friday is the day.

Now when will IDNs enter the real world (aside from China, where they have been in the real world for years now):

Rod Beckstrom, ICANN’s new president and CEO, said that if the change is approved, ICANN would begin accepting applications for non-English domain names and that the first entries into the system would likely come sometime in mid 2010.

Wait a second. Weren’t IDNs supposed to be launched this year? Or 2007?

I shouldn’t make a big deal about this. IDNs are not trivial. The smart folks in the IETF have been working extra hard to finalize the new tech standard. The security risks are real and tests needed to be conducted over the past year before moving ahead. The logistics of managing the rollout among the world’s registries is significant. And let’s not get started on how IDNs will impact applications and the companies who support them.

IDNs are happening though. As they should.

Of the 1.6 billion Internet users worldwide, Beckstrom — a former chief of U.S. cybersecurity — said that more than half use languages that have scripts based on alphabets other than Latin.

“So this change is very much necessary for not only half the world’s Internet users today, but more than half of probably the future users as the use of the Internet continues to spread,” he said.

By the way, ICANN has a new Web design. I like it.

PS:  Here’s a great op-ed on IDNs and how far they have yet to go…

I like it. The languages are presented in the native scripts. The user has to select one before entering the site. Most of all, I like that the languages aren’t hidden behind a pull-down menu.

Am I missing something here? The page title for the Drudge Report is dated 2010.  Maybe Drudge is just anxious to usher in a new year…

Was there any doubt that Twitter would not try to crowdsource its translations?

After Facebook proved that it could use volunteers to go from 1 to 100 languages in two years, it was just a matter of time before Twitter adopted the same model.

Twitter is starting out with the FIGS (French, Italian, German, and Spanish). And here is a video tutorial from Twitter that shows you how how the platform works.

Crowdsourcing is the new black these days, and much of it deserved. But despite the buzz, companies should be very careful before embracing the model.

Very few companies are translation-worthy

Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, TED, and Twitter have legions of fans who are happy to lend their translation skills. But few corporate sites or services are so translation worthy. And there’s the ever-constant risk of translator backlash or burnout. We are in uncharted territory, and as more companies pursue this model, we’re going to see more and more efforts backfire. Hey, maybe we’ll even see companies begin to “pay” their volunteers in non-monetary forms of compensation. Which leads me to…

Crowdsourcing may not save you much on translation

The translation platform, the management of the platform, the management of the volunteers — they all require resources. And the odds are that you’ll still want to retain professional translators to manage the amateurs, which is not a bad thing. There is a peace of mind in having a vendor who does this sort of thing for a living signing off on a newly localized web site before it goes live. In the end, translation crowdsourcing is not about saving money.

As far as I can tell, Twitter has only a thousand or so text strings that require translation. In the time the company devoted to building this translation platform, it could probably have had the site localized in 50 or more languages.

Over time there probably will be cost savings, but I would argue that cost savings should not be the motivator and probably wasn’t the motivator for Twitter.

The platform companies develop to support crowdsourcing should have other measures of success, such as user engagement and testing, partner opportunities, and developer involvement.

For example, on the Twitter Translate information page, this paragraph jumped out at me:

Will my favorite applications be translated, too?
We know that Twitter is not all about Twitter.com, so our global reach shouldn’t be limited to Twitter.com either. That’s why we’re planning to give our developer community access to the translation files so they can create wonderful apps that use the translations, too.

This is where Twitter is headed with the platform, as well as Facebook and Google. Once you have the platform, you can get creative with it — expand it to developers so that they can quickly localize their apps. You can even try to open up the platform for “partner” sites to use — which is what Facebook is now doing.

As companies comes to grips with social media, they are slowly learning to let go. Employees blog and tweet. Customers post content on corporate sites, and now they are co-creating the localized products.

The top-down localization model is giving way to the bottom-up model, and this is a profound change, even if it’s limited to a handful of companies — albeit companies that represent a few hundred million users. I’m still trying to understand how far this phenomenon will go.

Midge, as many of your know, not only runs Byte Level, she writes.

Short stories mostly. Lots of short stories. And short stories aren’t exactly where the fast bucks are being made these days.

So it’s nice to see her getting recognized for her work.

She is a 2009 Artist Trust Fellowship recipient!

I know I’m slightly biased, but it’s much deserved.

But hey, those slogans are cool to look at, right?

Here are two German examples:

I wrote about this phenomenon back in 2006, when I predicted that companies would eventually do away with global slogans. It seems to me that the next generation of global brands won’t have them and won’t need them. I pointed out at the time that Google didn’t have a global slogan, but apparently I overlooked YouTube. Even Google has fallen for a lure of the global slogan.

Nike tried to translate “Just Do It” but gave up and just used the slogan globally. So perhaps the “global slogan” is here to stay.

But my advice to companies just getting started — avoid them if you can. The risks generally outweigh the rewards.

Until there is a “global consumer” there is no such thing as a “global slogan.”

So I suppose I should have been flattered when I came across four new posters by the esteemed design firm Pentagram.

Judge for yourself.

Here’s one of the Pentagram posters:

And here’s mine:

It could very well be coincidence that the designers came up with their concept independently. But I can’t help but think perhaps they came across my poster sometime over the past two years, when it’s been featured on such design web sites as Communication Arts and Smashing Magazine.

Though I’ve trademarked the poster, you can’t copyright an idea, just the execution of that idea. This issue is nothing new. The New York Times had an interesting article about it a few years back. Ideas influence ideas, directly, indirectly, or cosmically, and that’s the way the world works.

And it is flattering to see high-profile designers (influenced or not) applying a similar design concept.

What do you think?

The Kindle has gone international, sort of.

That is, Amazon is launching a new Kindle outfitted with a radio chip that works in most of the world’s cellular markets (100+) — as opposed to the US-only Kindle, which operates only on Sprint’s network.

Unfortunately, just because someone in, say, Russia will be able to download a book, doesn’t mean that the book itself will display Cyrillic characters.

You see, even though the Kindle may operate in much of the world, it is still a Latin-only device.

I learned this the hard way when I helped adapt Forgetting English for the Kindle. For example, in the short story First Sunday the Tongan line “Pou’li ā, Sione” came out as “Pou’li a, Sione” — minus the ā.

That’s because “ā” and many other extended Latin characters won’t display properly. Needless to say, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, and Japanese aren’t going to have much luck either. Based on my parsing the sparse documentation on the Amazon site, I understand the issue isn’t a lack of Unicode support but a lack of font support.

Apparently you can use this Unicode hack to get your Kindle to display non-Latin characters, but this is hardly a mainstream solution. People shouldn’t have to download their own fonts to display the books they want to read. Basic font support in an e-reader is, well, something you would expect to find installed by default.

I’ve since come across a number of people who develop books for the Kindle who aren’t exactly happy about the situation.

Why doesn’t Amazon include a Unicode-friendly font on its device? Perhaps this was by design, to save on memory. After all, a Unicode font can easily weigh more than several MB, which takes away from precious book storage space.

My opinion is this: Amazon didn’t design globallay from day one. And that’s a shame for readers and writers alike. When you compare the Kindle with the iPhone, which supports more than 30 languages, I can only say that I’m looking forward to the coming of the iTablet.

The position is with a very large global company based outside of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Here is the job description:

The Marketing Manager-Localizations position will report to the Mgr-Localization and Content Management and lead the daily operations of the Global Information Management System. This includes working with the technology team to support workflows and issue escalation as well as liaising with affiliate counterparts via global meetings and phone calls. Also includes defining TM strategies and recommending future direction.  Priorities include localization project execution, resource assignments, and user administration as well as issue management. This role helps in developing ongoing strategies for future implementations and integrations.

The successful individual will leverage their proficiency to…

• Deep knowledge of the SDL WorldServer system
• Sound understanding of linguistic requirements, Translation Memory, Terminology Database and glossary management
• Strong background in Production management
• Technical understanding of functionality and capabilities of the WorldServer system.
• Development of strong partnerships with regional and affiliate localization teams

If you meet the qualifications and are interested, send your resume to me at jyunker (at) bytelevel (dotcom) and I’ll forward it along to the HR manager.

NOTE: That this is not a paid posting and I get no finder’s fee.

It’s funny how top-level domain names (TLDs) outlast the countries they represent.

In 2007 I wrote about the end of .YU (Yugoslavia), though it didn’t exactly go away back then.

Stephane Gelder writes that the TLD for Yugoslavia expires officially in a week, to be replaced by .RS (Serbia).

So this is it. Goodbye .YU. It was nice knowing you.

Speaking of domains that won’t die. .SU is still with us. I’m not sure that one will ever die. It’s become one of those retro domains that Russians don’t want to let go of. And I understand the attraction.

Domains are the street signs of our digital lives and it’s hard to let them go.

In case you’re wondering, I did not include .YU in the poster.

I came across one that I’ve been meaning to write about for some time — it’s the home page of a promotion Hyatt Hotels ran several months ago.

The site is still live here.

It’s a visually engaging global gateway and I love the many translations of “welcome” in the center of the page. Unfortunately, this gateway demonstrates three practices companies should avoid repeating. I’ll call them rules.

Rule #1: Global gateways should place function above beauty

I’ve got nothing against a great-looking web page. But job number one is getting users to where they want to go, and quickly. In the case of Hyatt, all those “welcome” languages are engaging, but they’re not clickable, something I learned when I tried clicking on “Bienvenido” and then “Benvenuti.” They’re just design elements.

The only clickable links on the entire page are at the very top and the very bottom of the page, which leads me to the next rule.

Rule #2: To paraphrase Steve Krug, don’t make users think about what language or country they need to select

The global gateway should require no thought whatsoever. But let’s say I speak German and I land on this page. I could click the “Europe” link at the bottom of the page or I could click the “Deutsch” link at the top of the page. Which do I choose? The very fact that I have to think about it means the design is flawed.

What’s interesting here is that if you select “Europe” a list of available languages will appear below it. Why not just have those languages there all along? Perhaps that would have helped. I think so. But the fact that there are two selections that the user must decide between is inherently bad design.

Rule #3: Don’t pretend you speak languages that you don’t

What’s really unfortunate about Hyatt’s gateway is that some of the “welcome” languages are not supported by localized web pages — such Greek and Slovenian. This could give visitors the impression you support their language when you really don’t. Not a great idea. Managing user expectations is critical, particularly when it comes to localized content.

Fortunately, the Hyatt gateway was temporary.

What do you think? Was I being too hard on the site? And are there any rules you would add?

Internationalized domain names at last becoming a reality around the world — and not just in China?

It’s looking that way.

For starters, the IETF is in “last call” of IDNAbis — which is a revision to the 2003 IDNA standard. This revision irons out a number of nagging issues (though not all of them) but more importantly lays the groundwork for ICANN, which has “fast tracked” IDNs for this fall.

And then there are the folks who will provide IDN registrations — the registrars and registries. It looks like .EU is going to support IDNs (though details are vague) an Bulgaria is planning Cyrillic IDNs.

What do you think? Are IDNs going mass market — finally?

So Bit.ly has launched an even shorter URL: J.mp.

You can’t get any shorter than this, at least not until we see single-digital TLDs.

I can’t help but wonder if this new URL is a sign that Bit.ly is planning to shift away from its Libyan-dependent domain to one that may be a tad bit more politically stable.

And you could argue that .MP does the trick. It is the domain of the Northern Mariana Islands. It’s also a part of the US (in some legal fashion that I don’t fully understand), which has to make the lawyers at Bit.ly breathe more easily.

So my prediction is that Bit.ly will be replaced by J.mp. And though Bit.ly might play up the shorter angle for the reason why, I think it’s the legal angle that matters more.

PS: I added J.mp to a growing list of these branded country code domains.

You’ve been warned.

About two years ago Midge and I took a cruise to Svalbard, a group of islands a hundred miles of so south of the polar ice cap.

A National Geographic photographer was on board: Paul Nicklen. He was on assignment and he gave some really entertaining lectures on how he would spend months camping out on these islands for that one perfect shot (and not always get it).

So I just came across his photos from that trip.

Amazing photos. Humbling photos.

Humbling because Midge and I had taken all these polar bear photos that we swore were National Geographic quality. That is, until we saw the real thing.

For example, here’s a photo we took:

Not bad, right? I was pretty happy with it.

Now, here is an excerpt of Paul Nicklen’s photo of the same bear:

Okay, so he just happened to catch the bear in flight. Lucky timing.

Oh, and the colors are brighter. The resolution finer.

I could blame my camera and its wimpy zoom lens. Paul carried around a lens the size of a Volkswagen Bus. And I could blame Photoshop as well, though I doubt he needed it.

In the end, Paul is a professional and I am an amateur.

The truth hurts.

But his pictures are a joy to view. They are here.

And while you’re still around, I want to share some more of our amateur pics.

Here’s one of a mother and cubs:

And here is an ice shelf — very hard to capture the size of it. But it was big.

And now back to our bear. I think he had an itch.

He came right up to the ship. The boats are not allowed to get anywhere near the bears. Once one is spotted in the distance, the ship stops and we all just wait and hope the bear approaches us. We got lucky this time. The guides said he was young and wasn’t familiar with all the smells. He was curious.

Very curious.

And this is the edge of the polar ice cap. The end of the line.

And here is our bear again. I think he had another itch. Or he was tired.

UPDATE: Here are some new photos of the polar bears of Svalbard.

Here’s a video of it in action (with some rather odd musical accompaniment):

What’s particularly interesting is that this IME began on the iPhone.

Here is a screen grab of the Chinese IME on my iPhone — and my sad attempt at inputting a character:

It’s interesting to see innovations migrating from phone to PC, certainly a sign of things to come.

Six months later, Google added ten more languages, a two-year growth trajectory illustrated below:

Google went from 13 languages to 51 languages in less than 16 months.

Not bad.

And, yes, I’m aware that we must not confuse quantity of translations with quality of translations. Your translation mileage will most certainly vary by language pair. Still, as language pairs go, Google is the only game in town across many.

Here are the 10 most recently added languages:

• Albanian
• Afrikaans
• Belarusian
• Icelandic
• Irish
• Macedonian
• Malay
• Swahili
• Welsh
• Yiddish

On a related noted, 41 of these languages are now incorporated into Google Docs.

That’s because it’s supported by WordPress.

It’s also the world’s first two-letter Montenegro (.me) domain.

Even though I use Bit.ly on Twitter, I still have concerns about what would happen if Libya clamped down on its ccTLD (link).

The only bummer about wp.me: You have to host a blog on WordPress to take advantage of it.

PS: I’ve created a new post dedicated to the ever-growing list of “countryless ccTDLs.”

According to the Seattle PI:

Starbucks recently opened stores in the Czech Republic, Amsterdam and Poland. And it has plans for a big push in China.

Starbucks began its expansion outside of North America in 1996 when it opened two stores in Japan. By 2000, teamed up with its Canadian operation, it had opened 127 stores internationally. Its appetite for worldwide growth grew bigger in 2005 when it set its sights on 1,500 stores internationally, including expansions into Brazil, India, Russia and China.

Perhaps it’s coincidence that when Starbucks redesigned its Web site recently the “International” link was promoted to the top of the page, as shown here:

For Starbucks, this is big.

The previous two web designs, stretching all the way back to 2003, relegated the “Worldwide” link to the bottom of the left column.

Not an ideal location.

That said, now that Starbucks has promoted its international interface, there is still room for improvement.

For starters, the accented characters used in Österreich and España didn’t appear correctly on both my Mac and PC browsers. It looks like an Adobe Flash glitch, but a pretty big one I’d say.

Second, I’d like to see the “International” link accompanied with a globe or map icon. Would a non-native English speaker know to click on the International link? I’m not sure. A globe icon speaks many languages.

I’m glad to see Starbucks put an emphasis on International. It may seem like a trivial change in the great scheme of things, but I know how various departments and divisions within companies battle over the precious real estate of a global home page. Here’s hoping the International link retains its high-profile position.

I think it will. After all, international is where the growth is.

Still, I get a kick out of Maxitweet.

To understand what it does, here’s an example.

I entered the following text: 149 characters.

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago–never mind how long precisely–having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore

And Maxtweet squeezed it down to 136 characters:

Caǁ me ʪhmael．Some years ago–never m㏌d how▕ong precێely–hav㏌gl计ᅱe or no money ㏌ my purse，and noth㏌g particular to interest me onshore

Those funny looking characters interspersed are pulled from Unicode’s wide pallet — such as ێ (ARABIC LETTER YEH WITH SMALL V). This character was used in place of “is.”

Other substitute characters used include “计”, “ʪ”, “㏌”, and “．” (I hope they all appear on your browser. Note that this blog is in Unicode but you may not have the right fond needed to display the characters)

Normally when I see this type of character substitution I think of phishers creating bogus domain names. But for once this traditionally nefarious technique has found a recreational application.

Here’s how the Tweet came across on on my iPhone:

Go Unicode!

And perhaps I was right in more ways than one.

Because now it appears that .CN is experiencing its very own .COM bust.

Just a year ago Chinese domain registrations were booming, so quickly in fact that .CN had surpassed .DE to become the most-registered ccTLD.

Of course, registrations were cheap, really cheap.

A year later, those domains have come up for renewal. And, according to Domain Pulse, more than a million of those domains have not been renewed:

Registrations for .CN have declined from an end-of-month peak of 14,082,553 in February 2009 to 12,545,589, a decline of approximately 1.5 million

Which means Germany (.DE), at just under 13 million registrations, has regained the top spot as the number one ccTLD.

Even with ccTLDs, there are peaks and troughs, as illustrated here:

I’m still confident that .CN will reign supreme (perhaps until .IN gives it some competition).

But first it must recover from this little bubble.

Daniel Halloran of Marina del Rey, CA, was kind enough to share a view of his global workstation:

You can download the images here.

PS: I also created wallpaper for the iPhone, available here.

And it’s not some upstart web company out of the Bay Area.

No, this is a company called Global Electronics and it is based in Belarus.

And its web site is hosted at www.global.by.

Every month there seems to be more of them, which could mean that the quality of Google Translate is improving, or this site is doing better in the rankings, or some combination of the two. Or, it could be simply be that more people have discovered Google Translate.

Given my passion for country codes, it’s fair to say that I also enjoy language codes. And it is through language codes that you can figure out what languages users were translating your site “from” and “to.”

Here is one referral string from my site:

First, you can see that the person was using Google Korea, so it’s fair to say the person was translating from English into Korean. The “To” line is actually the blog title post translated into Korean.

That was an easy one.

This next one is a bit more challenging:

This person was using Google.com, so you have to focus on the language codes. There are two here — an “id” (which follows  “hl=”) and an “en” (which follows “sl=”). What this means is the person was translating from English into Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia).

Here is what the translated page looks like:

The quick and easy way to know the target language is to focus on the “hl=” string. In the screen shot below, the target language is German.

And here is a language code reference if you want to study your web logs.

What I want to know is what percentage of web traffic is taken up by Google Translate. Anyone care to share their Web log stats?

Based on my cursory analysis, I would estimate the figure to be between 5% and 10%, but that’s very rough.

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)
• good.is (Iceland)
• 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)
• look.fo (Faroe Islands)

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.

UPDATE 3: Added good.is

UPDATE 4: Added Look.fo.  Faroe Islands. Go figure.