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Filed under: Utilities, Freeware, Web

Wordoid helps you make nonsense names with good domains

Wordoid

"Wordoids", which are words that are made-up, but sound right. They follow the rules of phonetics, and if done properly, roll off the tongue. The need to have an online presence has increased the need for unique product and company names and has led to these wordoids. Yet, even with a made-up name, it's important for the name to convey something about what the product or business actually is. Now you can do it very quickly using a website called, appropriately enough, Wordoid.

For example, I gave Wordoid the shortened acronym we use for Download Squad when talking on our internal mailing list, which is DLS. The first option Wordoid presented is dlsident, and it informs me that the related domain dlsident.com is available. While it doesn't look like much, if you spell out the first three letters as we do when using the acronym, this name actually rolls off the tongue quite nicely. It's like a subversive version of the name. Other options it came up with are dlsider, dlsidad, dlsidends, and dlsidanila. Certainly, they're not all winners, but I bet they're better than you expected.

You can tell Wordoid where to place your seed word - at the beginning, end, or anywhere including in the middle of the text string it returns. This gives you a ton of flexibility to guide your wordoid's creation to include useful information, but still come up with something unique, easy to say, and with an available domain name.

Filed under: Internet, News

ICANN approves non-Latin characters for domain names

Cyrillic URL
As expected, the international agency that regulates internet domain names has approved a new rule that allows URLs to be written using non-Latin characters. In other words, native speakers of Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Hindi, and other languages will be able to spell out web addresses using their oown alphabets.

Roughly 1.6 billion internet users speak languages that don't use Latin characters. That's half of the people that usee the internet.

Officials describe the move as the "biggest technical change to the Internet since it was created four decades ago." Nations and territories will be able to apply for internet extensions reflecting their regions starting on November 16th. We'll probably start seeing Internationalized Domain Names starting in mid-2010.

[via TechCrunch]

Filed under: Internet, News

ICANN set to approve web addresses using non-Latin characters

Cyrillic URL
There are web pages written in virtually every living language. If you read Japanese, Korean, Arabic, or Hebrew, odds are you can find web sites written in your native tongue. But in order to find them, you'll probably have to enter a string of Western characters into your browser's address bar.

That's because up until now, the organization that oversees domain names has only accepted URLs with Latin characters. But this week the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is expected to approve a new rule allowing addresses to be written in different scripts, including Arabic, Greek, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, and Cyrillic (Russian).

While the change might not affect English speakers reading this web site all that much, this is huge news for the 1.6 billion internet users who speak languages that don't use Latin characters. So while we have no plans to change the web address for Download Squad, I did consult with Google Translate today to learn that the site would be called something like загрузка Сборная in Russian. Because, you never know.

The new rule could be adopted as soon as Friday, although we probably wouldn't see the new Internationaliised Domain names (IDNs) until mid 2010.

ICANN has been looking at the change for a few years. But there have been technical kinks to work out. Essentially, under the new system, users will be able to enter URLs in a variety of different scripts and the domain name system will apply some new translation techniques in order to ensure that users are taken to the correct web page.

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