Agriya

There are nearly two billion Internet users around the world today, many of them native in languages that do not use the Latin script. The use of language font packs to bring Chinese, Arabic or Devanagari in to written webpage content has long been standardized. But there has been one area of the Internet user experience that has never been open to equality in the languages: the one of the naming of domain URLs. The autonomous body that regulates and sets standards for the Internet, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) is now ready to roll out registration for Internet domain names written in scripts like Chinese, Russian and Arabic, by 2010. Internet addresses used to be assigned under a protocol known as the Domain Name System, or DNS; the DNS system still applies today, but it works in conjunction with the new Internationalized Domain Names IDN system that allows native use of foreign languages. How does all of this work?

The DNS system has always only been capable of accepting ASCII or all Latin characters. When you type in a regular Internet address into a browser, the DNS system translates the user-friendly name into a string of numbers that identify the network address the name appeals to. The new IDN system does not replace the DNS system; it merely works with it, by using algorithms like ToASCII and ToUnicode to translate non-ASCII text to ASCII standards. All browsers today have been updated to accept IDNs.

Starting November 16, 2009, countries and language communities can begin to apply for language-specific top-level domain names or country code extensions like.uk or .us. This move while it has been in the making for nearly ten years now, coincides with the way the US government has started to ease its control over the Internet body Icann, paving the way for true autonomy.

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Bing, Microsoft’s decision search engine, has been chipping away at the market share of its competitors since its official launch on May 28th this year. On an average, Bing has gained about half a percent a month and an overall 1.3% (9.3% in August, 8.9% in July, 8.4% in June and 8% in May) gain in the three months succeeding its launch. In about the same period Google, the market leader registered a fall of 0.3% to 64.7% while Yahoo came down by the same amount to 19.3% (source: ComScore). In August, Bing grew faster than Google for the first time, with a 31.9 percent annual increase in search queries compared to 21.6 percent growth for Google and 16.8 percent for Yahoo. So the rise in the market share of this Microsoft search engine does seem to be at the expense of the other two.

Some experts consider these early gains in the Bing market share the result of superior technology from its recent acquisitions and better algorithms for seeking the context underlying a search. Many users feel aerial photos available via Bing are more up to date and have better clarity than the corresponding Google photos. The eye-catching design too is bound to have helped Bing made inroads with viewers.

Skeptics, however, contend that this so-called increase in market share is driven by any number of factors such as the curiosity engendered by a new launch, the publicity and media hype that a hundred million dollar marketing drive is likely to generate, the fact that Bing is the default search engine on the latest versions of IE and Microsoft’s cash back offer for Bing users and is highly unlikely to last. Some of the skeptics also are casting doubts on the veracity of the statistics by stigmatizing the sources as unreliable.

A strong competitor to Google in the search market can only be good news for users. Google has for too long been almost a monopoly. The more choices that consumers get the more likely it is that necessity will drive more and more innovations in the search engine market.

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With a large degree of advancement in technology, the internet today is not only used for checking e mail and browsing new web sites but to a large extent, for social networking. And understandably so, because looking at the quality of jobs we perform people seem to need some form of an outlet. And as travelling expenditures have become quantifiable the internet is the only way we seem to be able to stay in touch with our friends. And after the emergence of sites like Facebook, it has become a boon to use Facebook ,Orkut and lots others to feel connected.

According to statistics the number of users involved in social networking has increased to 55.6 percent in the year 2009. Specifically, 55.6 million adults or just less than 1/3rd of the population in the United States now visit social networks at least monthly. That’s up from just 15 percent of adults in 2007, and around 18 percent last year.

It was also noted that the number of internet users utilizing the net to check their mail leads the list. The number is close to 95% of the population. A large sector of the population sends or receives photos through the internet and that number is around 60%, while research products and purchasing them which used to be around 50% crossed 60% in the year 2009. The next largest section watches videos on the internet which constitutes around 30% of the population and around 30% of the population have been involved in social networking in the year 2009 while the number was around 15% in 2007.

So all in all, not only is the internet being put to good use commercially in terms of purchasing products but has brought in a new perspective to the concept of social networking making it possible for anyone to communicate from one part of the globe to the other.

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The human brain responds to images, color and film, better than any kind of text. This is the reason why advertisements on television always do better then print ads. The brain likes movement and responds to sound.

We all like things that please our eye, and the first thing you learn as an advertiser / designer, is to create something that is going to catch attention. It just so happens, that movement, like in a video, alerts the brain, as it processes what is going on, and anticipates what it is to see in the next few seconds. Something in print, on the other hand, is static. Our eyes take it in at one go, and the brain doesn’t need to function any further. It therefore holds attention for fewer moments.

When you visit a website, pretty much the same stuff applies there as well. Nobody really has the time to sit and read through your product’s features and how lovely they are. To make an instant impact, nothing works like a well done flash video. Use the right images, the right colors, the right sound, and customers are attracted to it like nothing else. If you run an online business, it makes it all the more important that your website has good videos of everything you have to offer.

If you own a business otherwise, and own a website to promote it online, good videos are bound to increase your sales, considering the number of people that access the internet today. For example, if you own a shop that sells sports equipment and you have the best equipment from all over the world, if your website is unimpressive, you are losing out on a large number of customers. With powerful and impressive videos of sports champs, and how they can’t do without excellent equipment, everybody who visits your site is inspired to buy something, whether they are into sports or not. You have an edge over all your competitors, and people tend to buy from you, rather than from someone else, even though it might the same equipment. What’s more, if your website is well designed and has a flash video playing motivating videos, you just might be able to expand your business and have people order equipment online. So that means more sales, more money.

Whether your website is about sports, tourism, religion, books, or anything else under the sun, including videos on it attracts more people. When there’s a video player on the website, people are compelled to watch the video out of sheer curiosity. So the next step, after making sure your video is excellent, is to ensure your player is good enough, and has features that people are comfortable working with. There are a very large number of players available, make sure you pick the right one for your website, and watch your sales grow multifold.

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