Good description of Mixi, a Japanese social network, and some thoughts on why it might be so popular in Japan.

Live from Bejing: "Whenever I show Chinese websites to American friends who don’t speak Chinese, the friends universally have the same reaction — “Wow! That site sure is crappy-looking! Guess those guys haven’t learned how to design a good website yet, huh?”
"Most Americans are by now nodding their heads: “Yep. Love those US sites. Much […]

The Global English Style Guide: Writing Clear, Translatable Documentation for a Global Market. Global English rocks. Short sentences are easier to read. Clear writing help everyone.

International Address Fields in Web Forms. Good stuff, for example: “This common understanding is so definitive that eyetracking data
suggests, once people begin filling in a set of input fields that make
up an address, they often cease looking at their labels.”

The 1860 US Census is now available online (via) A wonderful historic document with great examples of culturally biased catgories.

Younghee Jung: “At an indian wedding, one of many activities that kept the bride busy
was answering mobile phone calls from those who could not attend the
wedding. several mobile phones were passed onto her ears from others as
well as her own since some remote callers were considerate enough to
call other relatives attending the ceremony that they […]

“LiveJournal has decided that, in order to make certain that different
communities are represented, there will be two user representatives in
the Advisory Board. One will be elected to represent the Cyrillic
language community and the other will represent the non-Cyrillic users.
This may seem a bit odd, but it’s probably important to note that a
large percentage of LJ’s […]

Google: “Just last December there was an interesting milestone on the web. For the first time, we found that Unicode was the most frequent encoding found on web pages, overtaking both ASCII and Western European encodings—and by coincidence, within 10 days of one another.”

In Google’s webmaster tools, you can set the (geographic) location of your site, which may help it rank better for local queries. Here’s a video explaining:

Microsoft launches a language portal.