Well, they've done it. Those crazy party animals down at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN to their friends, I CAN'T to their enemies) are finally letting people test out their new system of top domain names in 11 different international scripts. At first, this doesn't sound like terribly exciting news. "People around the world from already use the internet, and they can just type the English," you might be tempted to say.
The problem is that a lot of people might not be very familiar with the Roman (Latin?) character set.* After living in Japan for a year, I can sympathize with how annoying it is to have to try and put your language into the character set of another.
At first this whole thing probably doesn't seem like very big news, but I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot more about it in the years to come. And to be honest, I'm a little surprised that this didn't get more widely reported on the ol' inter-blog. Too bad because if the ICANN announcement had broken down the information into point form, it would have been a pretty good example of one of those 'Social Media News Relase'-things that have been all the rage these days.
-Parker