Indigenous domain name cybersquatted

For many Indigenous Peoples and any other organisation it is common to prepare to register your domain name only to find that someone has cyber squatted it or perhaps a member is using it for their own use. Too often groups are confined to thinking that if their name is not available in the .com, … Read more

Māori Language with IDNs

Issue 1: An immediate issue for Māori Language is the use of the umlaut (äëïöü). There are two issues here. (a) For many years the umlaut was implemented as an alternative for the macron and is widely accepted as a macron. It is quite likely that a user with Māori fonts will use an umlaut … Read more

Haka on Twitter

twitter

Two days ago I wrote at my disbelief and sadness of the lack of innovation that was being used by Māori Language advocates. While no public comments appeared on my blog, my cell phone and email certainly were busy with people questioning me and seeking advise. Not to mention those people who reminded me that … Read more

Māori macrons in domain names are now available

Recently and with minimal media attention in New Zealand and the Pacific, the ability to write non English characters into Web addresses became a reality for many of the worlds popular extensions such as .com, .org, .net, .tv and so on. Thus giving Māori the ability to correctly spell macron Māori words in web addresses, … Read more

Dot Indigi Domain Name

.indigi is a new Internet domain name that will be the self governing Indigenous equivalent of the .com or .org . In late December 2008 i was appointed the Leader for this initiative which can be found at www.dotIndigi.com . While preparing our policy paper on .indigi i am often asked the same questions by … Read more

Social Media overlooked for Māori language week

We are at the end of another Māori Language week here in Aotearoa New Zealand. Most of us have seen and heard Māori language being spoken in mainstream radio, television and newspaper. The children’s television program “Sponge Bob” was also in Māori language. But alas!, the uptake of social media to promote Māori language has … Read more

FaceBook allows macrons and non English Characters in names

Many Māori and Pacific Peoples use alternative names to their birth names, often adopting an English name to be known by outside of the family. This is also a common practice with many non English speaking cultures in Asia. FaceBook.com in their quest to recognise the multilingual world we live in, today announced a new … Read more

macrons on iPhone

I am investigating how to create macrons the iPhone.  I must admit to feeling like i have gone back 13 and more years in my career to the days when i worked on macron technology for web sites and the PC. Thankfully a task that is now simple and requires little cognition. Like the old days ASCII … Read more

International domain name statistics

At the end of 2008, there were 177 million registered TLD domain names. Of the 240 cc TLDs there were 71.1 million registrations with 65% of them from only 10 ccTLDs according to Verisign. Of the top ten ccTLDs .cn, .de, .uk, .nl, .eu, .ar, .it, .ar, .br, .us and .au only 3 of the … Read more

The power of passive online activism

rangatiratanga

After wide spread protest over FaceBook’s new Terms of Use claiming perpetual ownership of all information you place on FaceBook.com, they have reverted their Terms of use as can be seen in their latest updated below. In a recent Mashable poll  56% of users were unhappy with the new Terms of Use. Now if our politicians … Read more

Hacking the Internet

During the recent Denial of Service (DoS) attack on a large international registrar effecting over 7.5 million web sites in 48 hours. I have learnt of an effective Internet vulnerability. I am only writing about it as once you read it, it is common knowledge and is only dangerous if you were inclined to try … Read more

Social Networks and Māori

I finally succumbed to perpetual requests from family and close friends to create a Bebo.com account. We know that Hi5.com is preferred by Thai’s and Orkut by South Americans, FaceBook.com and MySpace.com by a good international mixture. An observation that most intrigues me is that Bebo.com is, as is documented fact more for the younger generations (Gen M etc). … Read more

Māori representation on ICT boards

I have just heard Ernie Newman CEO of TUANZ speak at a Māori ICT conference (of which ironically we had no wireless Internet connection and cell phones were banned). Ernie expressed his vision for Māori and how Māori are creative and should participate more in ICT.  Ernie was asked what TUANZ had done for Māori … Read more