with Dr Karaitiana Taiuru
Commentary and free digital resources that promote and normalise the Māori language including spell checkers, dictionaries and mew terminology.
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
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
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
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 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
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
13 years ago when i started out in the ICT industry there were no Māori software products, writing a macron was impossible, and as hard as this is to believe now, only two Māori web sites existed. There was no .iwi.nz nor .maori.nz and no corpus of Māori computer terminology, not even for the word … Read more
Google Māori is accessed via the google.co.nz page. Alas, do I note that there are still macrons missing on the word “Māori”. It is refreshing to see it finally go live after the several years it took to get there. One important thing i have noticed that nobody has mentioned, is that there is still … Read more
This morning i was informed that the Google Māori translation project is beginning to be rolled out and available at http://www.google.com/intl/mi/ . This site is still in English at the time of writing. So i imagine there is a roll out plan as with any newly developed system. There is also a small (up to … Read more
Tonight the DNC public submission period on implementing IDN’s in the .nz space closed. Public submissions can be read here http://www.dnc.org.nz/story/30294-29-1.html . It concerns me that some organisations have such a closed mind of the Internet. The Internet and the DNS is not a New Zealand only technology, but an international technology. From my quick … Read more
With great disbelief and frustration, I read the following article ;objectid=10453254) which also appears on Stuff about a husband and wife team whom have either mislead the NZ Herald reporter or whom have been miss interpreted by the NZ Herald reporter. Anyone in the world can and has been doing for several years, register at … Read more
Writing a macron in a domain name is possible in several existing domain names including .com . An example is one of my own domain names www.māorimacrons.com . Yes, the macron is supposed to be there. Currently it is not possible in .nz . Domains that allow a non English character to be used are … Read more
We live in a country with two official spoken languages. Our country is known by both its English and Māori names. Aotearoa/New Zealand. Our national mountains are known by their bilingual names. “Aoraki/Mt Cook”, Taranaki/Mt Egmont” and the list goes on. NZ has bilingual sign posts, government departments, schools, early childhood facilities and much more … Read more