Adventures in Thailand

[Edwin]

A little example of just how wide open the IDN market is...

This morning, I registered the .com Thai language equivalents of: drink, forum, chat, diary, law, message board, politics, card, photography, education, download, horoscope, radio, science, religion, architecture, girl, environment, ecard, hardware

Some of the above have US Overture counts in the thousands, meaning they're likely to be HUGELY popular terms (it's not an exact science when there's no local Overture tool).

I can't read, speak or write a single letter of Thai. But I worked from Dmoz's Thai language directory and from the site navigation of one of the big portals, Sanook, which I found while checking some of the keywords I'd found in Dmoz.

All in, it took me just over 2 hours to find, confirm the availability of and register the above list...

Now according to Clickz's stats, there are 7.5 million Thais online out of a total population of 65 million.

Nobody can say with 100% certainty how IDNs will pan out, but for a total investment of $159.80 I've got a pretty good foothold in the Thai market if they do take off.

And it's opportunities like this which explain why I've become an IDN believer.

[Honan]

Congrats Edwin on your new venture into Thai IDN
Which Thai word for "girl" did you register?

[Edwin]

สาว

[Banned: domain newbie]

สาว

i can not get the point of IDN at all, could anyone pls explain?

As far a am concerned to type IDN , you need to change the keyboard language at your laptop first!

so how these typins would perform?!

would people type "สาว" in their language first,and then they will click CTRL and something to change to English to click "com" or what??

[Anthony Ng]

would people type "สาว" in their language first,and then they will click CTRL and something to change to English to click "com" or what??

Interesting question indeed.

[David G]

Good question Angel. It also makes no sense to me.

[David G]

Deleted this double post. Due to server being so slow and hitting submit more than once thinking first one failed after a few minutes went by. This has happened many times lately. Perhaps its due to the recent program upgrade?

[thefabfive]

There are multiple ways around having to switch keyboard languages that are fairly simple. The best way, and currently in development, is IDN.IDN. This is where the .com or .net would be replaced by the equivalent in whatever language you are using. For example, in Russian, the .com would become .KOM (I don't have the cyriliic language here but you get the picture). This would not be a new extension but would simply map to the .com.

The hundreds of type-ins currently for Russian domains show that they've figured something else out in the meantime though.

[simon]

i can not get the point of IDN at all, could anyone pls explain?

As far a am concerned to type IDN , you need to change the keyboard language at your laptop first!

so how these typins would perform?!

would people type "สาว" in their language first,and then they will click CTRL and something to change to English to click "com" or what??

No you dont need to, For example people in Germany have German keyboard and they dont have to change it to German to type in German IDN names.
simply type straße for strasse or öl for oil.

[puxa2]

As far as I know, as someone who types in spanish and portuguese and must use a US international keyboard in addition to standard US English, it's easy to toggle (if you need to) between languages/keyboards using the language tool bar. .Com can also be pasted to the end of a name. As mentioned, Verisign in collaboration with ICANN may create a foreign language version of the .com extension (.idn) for a given language which may be dnamed or mapped etc to the relevant IDN.com.