A number of new Arabic domain names have been delegated by ICANN.

فلسطين (“Falasteen”), encoded as “xn--ygbi2ammx” to Occupied Palestinian Authority

تونس (“Tunis”), encoded as “xn--pgbs0dh” to Tunisia

الاردن (“al-Ordon”), encoded as “xn--mgbayh7gpa” to Jordan

The new Chinese Internationalized Domain Name extensions .中国 and .中國 have been approved. Both extensions meaning .china will be managed by the Chinese registry CNNIC.

There is speculation as to how many will adapt to an internationalized domain name structure as compared to dot com and dot cn extensions.

According to Reuters, China’s population of Internet users jumped by nearly a third to 384 million at the end of 2009. With this large population of users, even a lesser share of IDN.IDN as compared to .com and .cn will be significant in terms of popularizing IDNs as well as IDN investment. continued

The first IDN.IDN (top level domains with non-Latin characters) went live on May 7 2010.

The Egyptian minister of Communication and Information Technology, announced the launch of Arabic as the first non-latin script to adopt the system and get a top level domain (TLD) with a non-latin extension.

This is how the link looks like:

http://موقع.وزارة-الاتصالات.مصر/

If you copy this in the address bar of a supporting browser, it will switch it to the Puny Code version and take you to the site.

According to ICANN announcement earlier:

For the first time in the history of the Internet, non-Latin characters are being used for top-level domains. The first IDN country-code top-level domains were inserted in the DNS root zone earlier today. The associated countries and their respective IDN ccTLDs are:

Egypt: مصر (Egypt)

Saudi Arabia: السعودية (AlSaudiah)

United Arab Emirates: امارات (Emarat)

These are the first IDN ccTLDs to appear online as a result of the IDN ccTLD Fast Track Process which was approved by the ICANN Board at its annual meeting in Seoul, South Korea on 30 October 2009.

A sunrise period for Luxembourg domains has been announced.

“As of February 1st 2010 registration of domain names with special characters in them, like for example a letter with an accent, called Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) .lu will be possible. Acceptable special characters are those commonly used in Luxembourgish, German and French languages. continued

Egypt, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are the first countries to get ICANN approval for Internationalized Domain Names.

This has been the passing of the ‘String Evaluation’ stage, the second out of the three stages laid out by ICANN. Its clearance implies acceptance of the proposed extensions (and hence completion of the url string). continued

This is one subject that needs a series of posts if not a full blog. Yet, I don’t mind going through whatever length as I feel very strongly towards developed domains. I think this is where a lot of business lies in future.

One of the reasons for people not going towards designing and developing websites is that it seems daunting, time consuming and tedious, all very true and valid reasons.

But above all is the basic fact that domain name investors as a convention have been internet entrepreneurs more than web developers. continued

Here is a scenario that none of us is very unfamiliar with.

You thought about a nice generic term, rushed to your favorite translator and got yourself a nifty one word in the foreign language. Not only that; your domain search tells you that the domain is available to register.

Well, what are we waiting for? Lets go get a dot-com and a dot-net and a ccTLD for good measure, shouldn’t we? Well, why not, but a word for the wise here. continued

There is one very significant advantage of an IDN that is often missed.

Let us say you have a non-English website either for giving out information to your non-English speaking readers, or you have a business or ecommerce site that uses a translated version for some of your international clients and buyers.

Perfect scenario to register a domain in non-Latin characters and making your content more penetrating and with better returns. continued

Selling an IDN may not be as competitive today as it surely is going to be in the near future. Do you have a strategy that is better than your competition?

One way to increase the chances of selling an Internationalized Domain is to consider developing the domain name into a live domain.

Doing this can increase your chances of selling by letting others understand a foreign language term better. Also, seeing the domain name in action will inspire visitors into getting new business ideas, and will encourage them to make a good offer. continued

Those who have interest in IDN domain names need to know a point or two about browsers.

Top choice is Firefox browser from Mozilla for many reasons. Upgrade to IE7 or IE8 if you must stick with MS. Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) doesn’t support IDN domains (Hopefully you are not running IE6 in any case). Opera, Safari and Chrome, all first class browsers already support IDN domains.

A few adjustments may be needed. Take care of the browser settings for international languages. Also re-set windows for international languages (in the control panel). You will be asked for the setup CD. Keep that handy.