Another dissapointment is Failblog.org. A once funny and quick moving site is now painful to puruse. They should be paying US to surf through their website full of endless ads, popups and video ads. It seems suddenly that popup ads are making their way back, and many successful website businesses have found it acceptable once again to employ this tactic. I believe Failblog.org has hit their high water mark here with 750k visitors a day. Goodbye FailBlog, it was nice knowing you.

The domain name calling out a website’s web address, also called a URL, is about to become multilingual as we first reported last week. AP writer Kelly Olsen reports that as early as November 16th 2009, we may start to see the use of non-latin scripts such as Korean, Chinese and Arabic.

The decision by the board’s 15 voting members was unopposed and welcomed by applause and a standing ovation. It followed years of debate and testing.

The result clears the way for governments or their designees to submit requests for specific names, likely beginning Nov. 16. Internet users could start seeing them in use early next year, particularly in Arabic, Chinese and other scripts in which demand has been among the highest, ICANN officials say.

“This represents one small step for ICANN, but one big step for half of mankind who use non-Latin scripts, such as those in Korea, China and the Arabic speaking world as well as across Asia, Africa, and the rest of the world,” Rod Beckstrom, ICANN’s CEO, said ahead of the vote.

 Kelly goes on to write:

Since their creation in the 1980s, domain names have been limited to the 26 characters in the Latin alphabet used in English — A-Z — as well as 10 numerals and the hyphen. Technical tricks have been used to allow portions of the Internet address to use other scripts, but until now, the suffix had to use those 37 characters.

That has meant Internet users with little or no knowledge of English might still have to type in Latin characters to access Web pages in Chinese or Arabic. Although search engines can sometimes help users reach those sites, companies still need to include Latin characters on billboards and other advertisements.

Now, ICANN is allowing those same technical tricks to apply to the suffix as well, allowing the Internet to be truly multilingual.

Many of the estimated 1.5 billion people online use languages such as Chinese, Thai, Arabic and Japanese, which have writing systems entirely different from English, French, German, Indonesian, Swahili and others that use Latin characters.

“This is absolutely delightful news,” said Edward Yu, CEO of Analysys International, an Internet research and consulting firm in Beijing.

The Internet would become more accessible to users with lower incomes and education, said Yu, who was speaking before the widely expected decision.

Countries can only request one suffix for each of their official languages, and the suffix must somehow reflect the name of the country or its abbreviation.

Non-Latin versions of “.com” and “.org” won’t be permitted for at least a few more years as ICANN considers broader policy questions such as whether the incumbent operator of “.com” should automatically get a Chinese version, or whether that more properly goes to China, as its government insists.

ICANN also is initially prohibiting Latin suffixes that go beyond the 37 already-permitted characters. That means suffixes won’t be able to include tildes, accent marks and other special characters.

And software developers still have to make sure their applications work with the non-Latin scripts. Major Web browsers already support them, but not all e-mail programs do.

In China, Guo Liang, a researcher who studies Internet use for the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the government’s top think tank, questioned whether all Chinese will embrace the new domains.

Although the move will reflect linguistic and cultural diversity, Guo said, “for some users it might even be easier to type domains in Latin alphabets than Chinese characters.”

China has already set up its own “.com” in Chinese within its borders, using techniques that aren’t compatible with Internet systems around the world.

Most Chinese and Japanese computer users write characters in their native scripts by typing phonetic versions on a standard English keyboard.

China is among a handful of countries that has pushed hardest for official non-Latin suffixes and could be one of the first to make one available, said Tina Dam, the ICANN senior director for internationalized domain names. The other countries, she said, are Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

About 50 such names are likely to be approved in the first few years.

It seems Big Brother may be coming to the Blogsphere. Proposed FTC guidelines can be found here. While existing FTC rules already ban deceptive and unfair business practices. These new proposed guidelines aim to clarify the law and for the first time, specifically include bloggers, which they define loosely as anyone writing a personal journal online.
 
If these guidelines are approved, bloggers will have to back up claims and disclose whether or not they are being compensated for what they say in their writings.
 
The  FTC does not currently specify how they plan to go about this, but they say they could order violators to stop and pay restitution to customers if found in breach of such trusts. It could also ask the Justice Department to sue for civil penalties.

Any type of blog could be scrutinized, not just ones that specialize in reviews. Even for example one line twitter posts are subject to these new guidelines. The FTC certainly will have a big job ahead of them as new communications channels continually emerge. Even advertisers now are paying some Twitter users to post tweets. 
 
The FTC says the guidelines would cover all such arrangements, regardless of the medium. The FTC commissioners will be voting on the final guidelines this summer.