IDN Domains Talk

I just saw this on IDN Forums that Google Webmaster Central added IDN compatibility.

The main portion most users will be thankful it became IDN compatible is the Google sitemaps. It’s so much better for me to easily be able to see the native Japanese characters in my domains than to see punycode.

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I initially started buying domains to develop only. Initially I also registered domains hoping to create Japanese sites. My initial inspiration was just to build until I heard about the sale of celebrity.com for $1,000,000. I immediately thought of buying it in Japanese & registered geinojin.com & geinokai.com. The problem that I faced was that some wrote it as geinoujin, while others might write it as geinojin with no u in the middle. This was the first indication I had as a student studying Japanese that you can write a Japanese word in Latin letters but there will be various ways to write it. The mistypes will be varied. In Japanese there will usually be one way of writing the term.

So years later now I had the chance to start the IDN market off & I started to match IDNs with ASCII letters in Japanese. As my strategy evolved I realized there are certain terms that you can do well with both Japanese & nonJapanese letters.

1. Geo Domains
Recently I got into Geo Domains inspired by the Associated Cities Group. I started collecting the ASCII & IDN version of some Hotspots I know Japanese love to go.
In my collection I’ve collected
LosAngeles.jp, ロサンゼルス.jp, & ロス.jp (Last is short for Los)
Rome.jp, ローマ.jp (Yeah your boy owns Rome)
Cairo.jp & カイロ.jp (Only found out after buying it the IDN means Chiropractics too)
Atlanta.jp & アトランタ.jp (Won’t be used for a Geo site)
Why Both? Both provides the Japanese user & any potential advertiser in the target geo location a chance to view the site easily. You can even put up an English page with stats info etc.

To be continued later