KomodoPR.com

Today, ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the non-profit group that oversees domain names) voted to accept domain names in languages which are not based on Latin letters, such as:  Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Yiddish. This means that of the 1.6 billion Internet users worldwide, the 50 percent who use alphabets based on letters other than Latin could have a whole new cyberworld opened up to them.

 

This is amazing, considering that as recent as five years ago, the experts were saying that it couldn’t be done. Applications for the new Internationalized Doman Names (IDNs) will be accepted from the second week of November. However, it may not be all good, though. There are concerns over how people in countries that use the Latin script will be able to access websites with Korean, Hindi or Arabic domain names, for which ICANN does not yet have an answer. Additionally, this could bring phishing and typosquatting to a whole, new level.

Fancy yourself as a bit of comedian? Quick off the draw, are you? Can you tap into key social trends as they happen? Then get onto Twitter, squat a public hate-figure’s name and get to work on making the public chuckle.

Recent events such as Jan Moir’s comments about Stephen Gately’s death and the appearance of BNP leader Nick Griffin on BBC’s Question Time, have given rise to the post-modern, social media funny man. Enter the Twitter comedian.

This breed of comedian adopts a grossly caricatured version of someone their followers love to hate – then followers can follow an imaginary hour-by-hour account of what they’re up to. ‘Lots of job offers coming in. Nick Griffin has phoned twice’ tweeted @janmoir on the day her scandal broke.

After someone in the audience for Question Time’s suggested that they have a whip-round to get a one way ticket to the Antarctic for Nick Griffin, @realnickgriffin tweeted “the South Pole? with the f***ing penguins? those BLACK AND WHITE flightless b*****ds? have you not listened to a word i’ve said?”.

Greater hilarity is guaranteed when the real versions of these people end up having arguments with these comedians on twitter. The careers of these comedians may only last as long as we’re interested in these figures, but this is social media schizophrenia at it most entertaining.

Just picked this up from Komodo’s twitter. A tweet from Alan Rusbridger (Guardian Editor) about a website that shows trending topics around the world. Very useful for consumer trend spotters out there.

So what’s hot and what’s not? At the moment, @arushbridger, who tweeted about this map, shows up as a UK trend – as does Cheryl (Cole), autumn and Dyson (probably driven by today’s announcement about their new desk-fan-invention-thingy). Got something to say about these topics on Twitter? Get involved in the conversation.