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When browsing using IDNs (Internationalized Domain Names) it is important that the Unicode form is displayed in the browser address bar and not the Punycode form. Only the Unicode form is human readable. Well it is if you know the language the IDN is written in. Lets take the Korean web address  송파구청.한국 by way of example. 송파구청.한국 is the Unicode form xn--2e0b569ap6hmmg.xn--3e0b707e is the Punycode form You can convert between Unicode and Punycode forms using Verisign's online  IDN Conversion Tool . Unfortunately browsers do not always display the Unicode form but instead display the Punycode form in the address bar. Personally I consider that all browsers should always display the Unicode form. By displaying the Punycode form the browsers are impeding internationalization of the internet. The reason they give for displaying the Punycode form is for "Security". I am not convinced it is necessary because Registries take their own security measures to ensure registration of ...

On Saturday 23rd July Gordon Gekko, Jonny (刘家杰) and myself gave free T-shirts to Loughborough Market Stallholders. These T-shirts have Loughborough Market printed on them, not in English but in Chinese or Japanese. This endeavour is part of an initiative to internationalise Loughborough and make the World aware of Loughborough. In the photo below Gordon Gekko, who is on the left, is wearing the Chinese T-shirt and Jonny is wearing the Japanese T-shirt. The text printed on the T-shirts is: 拉夫堡市场 which is Simplified Chinese for Loughborough Market ラフバラ市場 which is Japanese for Loughborough Market Loughborough Market is on Thursdays and Saturdays so if you visit the market on a warm sunny day you may well see stallholders wearing these T-shirts. Note: It may interest you to know that Gordon has the adopted Chinese name 恺心 (Kǎixīn).

Those of you that use Twitter will be familiar with the concept and use of hashtags. Recently Twitter implemented internationalized hashtags. Specifically, they introduced hashtags for Chinese, Japanese, Hangeul (Korean) and Cyrillic scripts. This presents a golden opportunity for Loughborough Twitterers to raise the international profile of Loughborough. Or to put it another way: Make the World aware of Loughborough. All you need to do is put internationalised versions of #loughborough in your tweets. The more tweets that contain internationalised hashtags the more Loughborough will be noticed. If you would like to take part in this initiative then just copy one or more of the following hashtags and paste into your tweets. #拉夫堡 #ラフバラ #러프버러 #Лафборо where 拉夫堡 is Chinese for Loughborough ラフバラ is Japanese for Loughborough 러프버러 is Korean for Loughborough Лафборо is Russian for Loughborough By way of example, here is a link to one of my tweets in which I have used the Japanese #ラフバラ ha...

One can now use Unicode hashtags in twitter. This means that hashtags are no longer restricted to ASCII characters. One can now, for instance, have hashtags written in the Chinese or Japanese. The hashtag #loughborough can be written in Chinese as #拉夫堡 and in Japanese as #ラフバラ . Unicode hashtags have been operational since 13th July 2011. The original announcement is on the Twitter Japan Blog at blog.jp.twitter.com/2011/07/blog-post.html . There is also an announcement of the new hangeul (한글) hashtags (해시태그/해쉬태그) on Twitter's Korea Blog at blog.kr.twitter.com/2011/07/blog-post.html I gather from the announcement that the currently supported Scripts for hashtags are Chinese, Japanese, Hangeul and Cyrillic. Therefore the supported Scripts are a small subset of the Scripts available in the Unicode Character Set. I tested out some Scripts in hashtags and my results are: Chinese ✓ Japanese ✓ Hangeul ✓ Cyrillic ✓ Thai ✗ Arabic ✗ Hebrew ✗ Devanagari ✗ Tamil ✗ The announcement states that ...

I have frequently advocated the use of China's SNS in order to have a presence in China. I have had a Sina Microblog 新浪微博 for several weeks weibo.com/andreschappo . Sina's Microblog is a closed system so you will need to register an account in order to view my microblog. The exception is that with Verified Users one can view the first few postings without an account. My account is not verified. On Saturday, with the help of 刘家杰, I created a Sina Blog 新浪博客 blog.sina.com.cn/andreschappo . Unlike Sina Microblog, Sina Blog is an open system and so you can view my blog without registering an account.