Discussions and expert opinions on both New Zealand and International domain names and how they impact Māori and Indigenous Peoples.
This section primarily looks at .maori.nz, .māori.nz the worlds first Indigenous domains. Also discussions and options for new GTLD options from ICANN.
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
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
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
.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
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
FaceBook to offer vanity URL’s the Saturday. The consequences of not getting the right name for your organisation are significant.
Page squatting or Cyber Squatting also with sellable ads for sale are becoming popular in FaceBook and Twitter.
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
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
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
I have often wondered over the years how long the traditional paper based phone book will be in existence and how useful it is in today’s society when we are all connected to the Internet and have instant access to online phone books from all around the world as well as web sites that contain … Read more
With ICANN approving the IDN TLD for Russia, I hope this will start a “fast” flow of other TLD and GTLD’s being introduced in quick sucession. My understanding is that Russia will implement .РФ in June 2009. Then i am assuming they will offer all of thier 2LD’s in Cyrillic Russia already have 2 other TLDs … Read more
Earlier this week i read this article from Computer Weekly regarding the proposal to create a TLD .cym for the Welsh people. To summarise, the Welsh government have voted to support the creation of a new TLD .cym to identify the Welsh population and to create further financial pathways and a safer Internet for its … Read more
As a result of networking and making new friends from the Thailand conference, i have had to learn about Asia emoticons. Here is a list of what i have learnt so far. I am interested in any new additions and corrections ^_^ . I am now curious as to what the graphical representation looks like … Read more
The United Arab Emirates went live with their new Top Level Domain-TLD (Internet Name suffix such as .nz) .ae on August 03 2008. This refreshed my memory of the many opportunities Māori have to be creative when obtaining a web site address. We do not have to stick within the .nz space, not do we … Read more
Google recently announced that they indexed 1 trillion urls. In 1998 when Google first indexed the web there were 26 million url’s. For any individual or group who claims the Internet is not a viable communications vehicle need to re evaluate as does any indigenous/minority culture who see the Internet as threat to their culture. … Read more
Since 2001 when .maori.nz was introduced there have been at least 34 cases of cyber squatting that i am personally aware of. The biggest culprit bulk registered a number of tribal names the second .maori.nz was introduced, then put them up for sale often at 100 times the original price. We the Maori Internet Society … Read more
