Web 2.0.11562 beta

Nori - that quintessential sushi ingredient! Nori is technically laver, not seaweed, but if you’ve ever enjoyed sushi try to imagine what it would be like without this great wrapper. In Japanese cuisine nori is ubiquitous, shredded strips are placed on top of at least half the dishes there. Onigiri are eaten like sandwiches in the west. And nori is an important ingredient in many dishes - as you will see if you visit the website (and if you can read japanese!)

Japanese web surfers have long complained that remembering English-language URLs was difficult. I can imaging if I had to try to remember some Kanji domain names! Since we are involved in IDNs, we have begun to publish some Japanese language sites with good results. We published a group of themed sites around food domains: http://??.jp (natto), Mochi http://??.jp (mochi), http://??.com (uni), http://???.jp (mirin), http://??.com (ramen)

The clickthru rate is terrific, 20-25% and the clicks range from $0.20 to $1.50 - a resounding success! Let me get busy with cranking out some more….

???.com sold today for $42,250 and ???.com  sold for $36,194

These 2 Korean terms both mean handphone/cellphone - and they are the largest Korean language domain sale I’ve heard of. Of course, that always needs to be qualified with the usual disclaimer, “the vast majority of sales go unreported” That utterance is never accompanied by any sort of substantiation, but every domainer knows it to be true by extrapolating on his/her personal experience.

The widely anticipated IE7 browser was released today. First sighting I could find was at Yahoo!, where the Yahoo! branded and bundled browser package could be had for those early adopters. When the official, unbundled Microsoft version appeared the link still said that it was RC1. When downloaded it disappointed those waiting for support of some languages… I mean that it appears the early release supports only Japanese and Arabic. Roughly 50 other languages should be supported by the time the browser is”pushed” to folks around the world as a security update.

There seems to be plenty of religious wars going on due to the imminent release of Microsoft’s IE7 browser. The unwashed masses use this browser well in excess of 90-95% depending on the country. So the argument goes, folks in countries where English is not near-ubiquitous will gradually realize that they can type directly into the browser in their own language. I just don’t understand why people don’t think this is the inevitable result?

Sure, Mac users will say, they take for grated that they can use whatever language they want when navigating the web. And sure lots of programmers use Firefox (yours truly) which has long supported IDNs. And so on and so forth, say the devotees of Opera and Safari and Konqueror, etc. But the vast majority of web users have never realized they could, and soon they will make this discovery. Like I said I just can’t understand the naysayers…. if most of the web were in Chinese and suddenly I realized I could type English into my browser — guess what, I would!

Found this tutorial - this guy posted an abridged version for you to check out free. Try it, you’ll see it’s good! Only works for major languages, since it suggests Babelfish, but the ideas are valid in theory regardless of language.

Probably a good time to comment on namedrive.com also - service for IDNs seems good, although the ads themselves still need to be in native character set. I know, I know - it’s coming.

The IDN market that did not seem to exist last year is seeing activity every week now. Some sales from this past couple of weeks:

???.com (Nagaski in Japanese) for $2,300
Arbeitsverträge.de (Working Contracts - German) for $3,153
??.com (Home improvement Chinese) for $12,000
Más.com (more in spanish) for $3500
?.com (hair in Japanese and Chinese) for $6000
Natación.com (swimming in spanish) for $5729

These and others are recorded (with the story reference) here: http://www.idntools.net/idnsales.php

I notice someone bought ??.com for $600 even though its not really in any language?? Makes you wonder, huh….

Also it’s been reported in IDNforums.com that Yahoo! Japan began returning IDN results in their search engine this week. A Japanese blogger reported searching for Shibuya station ??? and the IDN version.com pops up as #3 in the results…. a harbinger of things to come I’d say.