The Well and the Cathedral

This is a very exciting development for all of the people in the world who use non-Latin characters, which I would posit is the majority. This is a major step forward, in my opinion, for the availability of information in general (or as they used to say just a few years ago, it closes the digital divide). I think this article sums it up best:

Let’s get ready to 파티에 나가다! ICANN, the body that organises domain names on the Internet, has approved non-Latin characters in Web addresses and top-level domains.

ICANN has been massaging the DNS system for a couple of years to get it ready to handle Web addresses with non-English-language characters, encompassing everything from Arabic and Chinese characters to accented letters in French. That means URLs will go from using 37 possible characters to over 100,000.

“The coming introduction of non-Latin characters represents the biggest technical change to the Internet since it was created four decades ago,” said ICANN’s Peter Dengate Thrush.

The change should make the Web more democratic and global, since non-English-speaking surfers won’t be forced to use domain names that don’t reflect their own language. We won’t have too long to wait before we start seeing the new URLs. ICANN says that it will accept applications by 16 November, and sites will be online by 2010.

Adding support for the thousands of new characters required an overhaul of the DNS system, the backbone of the Internet that gives each connected computer its own unique ID in the form of an IP address. But the challenges posed by the change aren’t just technical.

The huge range of new characters will also give scammers a newly loaded gun for firing off spoof Web sites. Because some characters look similar or identical in different languages, scammers could replace a letter in a URL with another to try to redirect visitors to the wrong site. The scam would be very difficult for users to detect because, at first glance, the URL would look correct — only a computer could see that the letter ‘a’ in paypal.com has been replaced with a Cyrillic letter ‘a’, for example.

Makers of Web browsers have already started implementing changes to help surfers spot these fakes, by alerting them when an address uses a mixed character set, for instance.

Two really exciting projects promoting open information access:

The Internet Archive has just unveiled their ambitious project called BookServer, which will allow users to find, buy, or borrow digital books from sources all across the web. The system, built on an open architecture and using open book formats, promises that the books housed there will work on any device whether that’s a laptop, PC, smartphone, game console, or one of the myriad of e-Readers like Amazon’s Kindle.

The project’s lofty goal is to essentially create an open web of books where anyone can publish their books and make their content available via search. (via Read Write Web)

And-

Google will launch an e-book store called Google Editions with a “don’t be evil” twist. Unlike Google’s biggest competitors, Amazon and Barnes & Noble, which rely heavily on restrictive DRM, Google’s store will not be device-specific–allowing for e-books purchased through Google Editions to be read on the far greater number of e-book readers that will flood the market in 2010.

Google’s e-books will be accessible through any Web-enabled computer, e-reader, or mobile phone instead of a dedicated device. This will allow content to be unchained from expensive devices such as Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader. However, as democratizing as this sounds, it’s still unclear how many people are ready to curl up with a Google Editions title on their laptop or smartphone, instead of the traditional paper format. (via PC World)

In other news, I’ll be at ALA’s Midwinter Meeting in Boston. The seminar on consulting had the biggest appeal to me- I registered the day after finding out about it! Pretty exciting.