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.

Jorge Arango: “One of the biggest challenges I face in my day-to-day work is that much of what individuals consider trustworthy (especially when dealing with a primarily visual medium, like the web) is obtained from subtle cues that are specific to their own culture. Japanese users expect a different visual experience than someone from the […]

(via)

Genevieve Bell, Intel.

The year of the rat on Yahoo China, Google China and Baidu:

(via Steve Portigal): the profession of writing letters for illiterate people in India is fading away due to mobile phones.

Why hasn’t Starbucks moved into Italy yet?