Hebrew, Hindi, other scripts get Web address nod

SEOUL, South Korea -The nonprofit body that oversees Internet addresses approved Friday the use of Hebrew, Hindi, Korean and other scripts not based on Latin characters in a decision that could make the Web dramatically more inclusive.

The board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers - or ICANN - voted to allow such scripts in so-called domain names at the conclusion of a weeklong meeting in Seoul, South Korea's capital.

The decision by the board's 15 voting members was unopposed and welcomed by applause and a standing ovation. It followed years of debate and testing.

The result clears the way for governments or their designees to submit requests for specific names, likely beginning Nov. 16. Internet users could start seeing them in use early next year, particularly in Arabic, Chinese and other scripts in which demand has been among the highest, ICANN officials say.

"This represents one small step for ICANN, but one big step for half of mankind who use non-Latin scripts, such as those in Korea,China and the Arabic speaking world as well as across Asia, Africa, and the rest of the world,"Rod Beckstrom, ICANN's CEO", said ahead of the vote.

Domain names - the Internet addresses that end in ".com" and other suffixes - are the key monikers behind every Web site, e-mail address and Twitter post.

Since their creation in the 1980s, domain names have been limited to the 26 characters in the Latin alphabet used in English - A-Z - as well as 10 numerals and the hyphen. Technical tricks have been used to allow portions of the Internet address to use other scripts, but until now, the suffix had to use those 37 characters.

That has meant Internet users with little or no knowledge of English might still have to type in Latin characters to access Web pages in Chinese or Arabic. Although search engines can sometimes help users reach those sites, companies still need to include Latin characters on billboards and other advertisements.

Now, ICANN is allowing those same technical tricks to apply to the suffix as well, allowing the Internet to be truly multilingual.

Many of the estimated 1.5 billion people online use languages such as Chinese, Thai, Arabic and Japanese, which havewriting systems entirely different from English, French, German, Indonesian, Swahili and others that use Latin characters.

"This is absolutely delightful news," said Edward Yu, CEO of Analysys International, an Internet research and consulting firm in Beijing.

The Internet would become more accessible to users with lower incomes and education, said Yu, who was speaking before the widely expected decision.

Countries can only request one suffix for each of their official languages, and the suffix must somehow reflect the name of the country or its abbreviation.

Non-Latin versions of ".com" and ".org" won't be permitted for at least a few more years as ICANN considers broader policy questions such as whether the incumbent operator of ".com" should automatically get a Chinese version, or whether that more properly goes to China, as its government insists.

ICANN also is initially prohibiting Latin suffixes that go beyond the 37 already-permitted characters. That means suffixes won't be able to include tildes, accent marks and other special characters.

And software developers still have to make sure their applications work with the non-Latin scripts. Major Web browsers already support them, but not all e-mail programs do.

In China, Guo Liang, a researcher who studies Internet use for the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the government's top think tank, questioned whether all Chinese will embrace the new domains.

Although the move will reflect linguistic and cultural diversity, Guo said, "for some users it might even be easier to type domains in Latin alphabets than Chinese characters."

China has already set up its own ".com" in Chinese within its borders, using techniques that aren't compatible with Internet systems around the world.

Most Chinese and Japanese computer users write characters in their native scripts by typing phonetic versions on a standard English keyboard.

China is among a handful of countries that has pushed hardest for official non-Latin suffixes and could be one of the first to make one available, said Tina Dam, the ICANN senior director for internationalized domain names. The other countries, she said, are Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

About 50 such names are likely to be approved in the first few years.

The Internet's roots are traced to experiments at U.S. universities in 1969 but it wasn't until the early 1990s that its use began expanding beyond academia and research institutions to the public.

The U.S. government, which funded much of the Internet's early development, selected ICANN in 1998 to oversee policies on domain names. ICANN, which has headquarters in the United States in Marina del Rey, California, was set up as a nonprofit with board members from around the world.

Beckstrom said Friday's approval is not simply aimed at enhancing convenience for Internet users using different scripts.

"It's also an issue of pride of people and their own culture and their own language, and a recognition that the Internet belongs to everyone," he told The Associated Press in an interview. "It's a shared resource. So I think it's a really exciting step for all of us."

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Internet overtakes television to become biggest advertising sector in the UK

The UK has become the first major economy where advertisers spend more on internet advertising than on television advertising, with a record £1.75bn online spend in the first six months of the year.

The milestone marks a watershed for the embattled TV industry, the leading ad medium in the UK for almost half a century. It has taken the internet little more than a decade to become the biggest advertising sector in the UK.

UK advertisers spent £1.75bn on internet advertising in the six months to the end of June, a 4.6% year-on-year increase, according to a report by the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. To put this in perspective, in 1998, when the IAB first measured internet advertising, just £19.4m was spent online.

The internet now accounts for 23.5% of all advertising money spent in the UK, while TV ad spend accounts for 21.9% of marketing budgets.

The IAB originally predicted that internet ad spend would overtake TV at the end of 2009; however, the crippling advertising recession accelerated this by six months. TV advertising fell about 17% year on year in the first half, to about £1.6bn, according to the report.

The IAB's figures show that of the total of £1.75bn spent on internet advertising, £1.05bn, or 60%, was spent on search advertising on websites including Google, up 6.8% year on year.

Online classified advertising grew by 10.6% year on year to £385m, about 22% of total internet ad spend. But online display advertising, such as banners on websites, fell by 5.2% year on year, to £316.5m. This was an 18% share of all internet ad spend.

The ray of light within the online display ad sector was the nascent, but rapidly growing, online video advertising sector. The IAB estimated that this sector grew by close to 300% year on year, to almost £12m.

Thinkbox, the UK TV marketing body, has taken exception to the IAB's figures, arguing that the internet is now mature and diverse and it is inaccurate to collate all the figures as if it is one single medium.

"It is interesting but meaningless to sweep all the money spent on every aspect of online marketing into one big figure and celebrate it," said Lindsey Clay, marketing director at Thinkbox. "Online marketing spend is made up of many things, including email, classified ads, display ads (including online TV advertising) and, overwhelmingly, search marketing. They should be judged individually."

Guy Phillipson, the chief executive of the IAB, reckoned that there is still significant growth potential left in the internet ad market.

"We could absolutely see it grow to being a 30% medium [of share of ad spend], to go past £4bn to even £5bn annually," he said. "Online display advertising has plenty of room for growth."

Despite the seemingly inexorable rise of internet ad spend, a closer examination of the IAB's figures show that the recession has had an impact. In the first quarter £920m was spent on online advertising, representing 8.6% year-on-year growth. However, in the second quarter, spend fell almost £100m to £832m, representing only a 1.1% increase on the amount spent in the same period last year.

Adam Smith, futures director at WPP's combined media operation Group M, argued that the internet's share of total UK ad spend could be close to its peak.

Smith cited factors such as the increasing share of time that users spend on social networking websites, which have not attracted huge advertising spend, and the increasing saturation of internet penetration in the UK as potential limiting factors. "This day was bound to arrive, as the internet has been attracting a huge long tail of advertisers that have not advertised before doing completely new things," he said. "It is a memorable event. However, it is a bit simplistic to make this comparison [and] it is always possible that internet's share [of total UK ad spend] could go backwards if TV has a good year."

The UK is not the first country where internet ad spend has overtaken TV spend, Denmark reached the milestone about six months ago. But it is the first major economy to do so.

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MySpace Set to Launch Developer Platform

We knew it was coming -- the only question was when.

MySpace has started accepting pre-registrations for its developer platform, and plans to take the developers' site live next Tuesday, Feb. 5. Starting then, MySpace will provide developers with open APIs and documentation to begin building widgets on the world's most popular social network.

Once it launches, developers will be able to test their applications in a live environment.

Widgets should begin actually appearing on MySpace sometime later -- the company is expected to announce this week how long the trial period will be before the platform opens to the public.

"The MySpace Developer Platform will be the world's sandbox, allowing developers large and small to come together and easily build creative, user-enriching applications," the company said in a statement.

MySpace also said it would work actively to help developers promote and monetize their widgets.

On Tuesday, the company also will hold a kickoff event and workshop for developers at its San Francisco offices.

Overseeing the platform will be Amit Kapur, recently named chief operating officer. Kapur will lead MySpace's global business initiatives and partnerships that the site looks to foster through its developer program.

MySpace in October first announced its developer platform plans, which some initially viewed as an effort to play catch-up to Facebook. MySpace's fast-growing rival has enjoyed considerable success with its own platform, which began offering third-party developer support in May.

In December, Facebook moved to open that platform, enabling developers to easily transfer their applications to Bebo and other participating social networks.

Last week, Facebook opened further, removing the server-side code requirement from its JavaScript client library so that any site running static HTML would be able to host Facebook applications, company developer Wei Zhu wrote on Facebook's developer blog.

MySpace, meanwhile, has said its developer platform would support OpenSocial. The initiative, launched by Google in November, aims to spur the industry to embrace compatible APIs, so that applications could run on any social site that adopted the standard.

Speculation has swirled over Facebook's positioning of its platform as a competing standard to OpenSocial.

Both OpenSocial and Facebook have dispatched representatives to the DataPortability Working Group, an open source consortium dedicated to interoperability and common data standards.

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Windows 7: A Top Seller, But Why?

Early indicators show that three weeks since its release, Microsoft's OS Windows 7 has become a best seller. The question is, what part of its ad campaign played a role in that success?

First the stats: On November 2, NPD Group reported that Windows 7 boxed software sales over the first few days of its release were 234% higher than those of its predecessor, Vista, for the same time period.

In another measure, Net Applications said that Windows 7 has already gained a 3% OS marketshare.

Family Guy Fallout?

In preparation for the rollout, Microsoft had planned a formidable - and potentially controversial - campaign that included a high-profile sponsorship of a half-hour episode of the Family Guy on Fox Network. No commercials would run; the entire show was to be about Windows 7.

However, Microsoft pulled its support of the spot after Windows 7 was released, saying its preview of the edgy animated show was not compatible with its own vision of the Windows 7 brand. (Warner Bros. will be advertising the upcoming movie Sherlock Holmes instead).

The Tip of the Iceberg

For all its hype, the failed Family Guy sponsorship was just a small part of a larger campaign strategy for Windows 7. Microsoft is still using TV, print, online banner ads, outdoor posters and social media games to promote the theme "I'm a PC and Windows 7 was my idea." The concept acknowledges general consumer and business dislike for Vista, and promotes Microsoft's use of consumer feedback in Windows 7's development.

The Ghost of Vista

Parsing through the sparse ad metrics available for Windows 7 so far, the data appears to support the fact that Microsoft was on target with the idea that consumers and businesses would give Microsoft another chance - if not for the ghost of Vista.

Net Applications, for example, found that Apple's market share remained the same, even as Windows 7's grew. If consumers had believed that Windows 7 was a Vista-like replay, the reasoning goes, Apple's share would have bumped up noticeably as consumers threw up their hands over Microsoft and moved to a competitor.

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