I was recently sent a document detailing all the international web domains by country. (Don’t ask why) So I am now the proud owner of a list that goes all the way from the Ascension Islands (.ac) to Zimbabwe (.zw). Reading through it gave me plenty of food for thought.

For instance, did you know that that Jersey (.je), Guernsey (.gg) and the Isle of Man (.im) have their own suffixes although they are part of the United Kingdom (.uk)? I certainly didn’t.

And did you know that .um was the domain suffix for United States Minor Outlying Islands? No? I’ve never heard of them either. The United States Minor Outlying Islands are in fact a group of islands, which includes Palmyra Atoll. None of the islands has any permanent residents - the population consisting of only temporarily stationed scientific and military personnel (316 at the last census!).

Looking at some of the more exotic and far-flung places in the directory reminded me of the island of Tuvalu and how its .tv suffix became quite a popular web domain for businesses in the world of television to adopt.

So how long before the following urls become sought after?

Cape Verde (.cv) – a must for recruitment consultants and headhunters

Croatia/Hrvatska (.hr) – for all Human Resources professionals

Guernsey (.gg) – for jockeys, horse breeders or bookmakers

Iraq (.iq) for Mensa members perhaps

Oman (.om) for practitioners of meditation

And finally Moldova (.md) for Managing Directors

More alternative uses for country code top-level domains will follow in a later blog. In the meantime, please send in any suggestions of your own.

How refreshing to receive the new Heineken commercial as a viral yesterday. It lifted my spirits during these bleak days, thanks tbwa neboko in the Netherlands, great work. 

Heineken walk-in fridge

This week, the Beechwood team went to a Russian restaurant to celebrate Russia’s “Old New Year” (a tradition celebrating New Year according to the Julian calendar).

My colleague Alina used the Internet to search for Russian restaurants in London. Browsing through several social media sites, she read restaurant reviews, looked at photos of restaurants and browsed through menus online, before she chose our venue. The restaurant was in the basement of a London hotel. Off the beaten track, the hotel itself was tricky to find. The restaurant within was even harder to locate, infact, there were no signs to indicate its existence.

Yet, we found ourselve in this busy basement restaurant, where every table was in use. As one of the team commented, “you wouldn’t just stumble upon this place; you would have to know about it”. My point is that the Internet has turned marketing on its head. In their 2008 benchmark survey for technology marketers, Marketing Sherpa found that 93% of those involved in the purchase of technology begin the sales cycle with an online search. Furthermore, 80% of those technology purchasers said that they found the vendor, that’s just 20% who were found by the vendor.

With the explosion of social media in the B2B world, marketers need to identify the online directories, forums and blogs most visited by their target audiences. Contribute to social networks and make sure your business and its solutions are highly visible online…you might not find the buyers, but they will find you.

I’m new to gaming and game culture but this struck a chord when I saw it yesterday. Here’s something I found on the BBC’s Click, and it’s purportedly an example of Web 2.0 gaming, with enhanced control for gamers including character and world building on a completely new level. The BBC’s Spencer Kelly takes a look at LittleBigPlanet, the latest online multi-player game for PlayStation 3 and creates his own level, with help from one of the game’s creators Kareem Ettouney.

View the BBC clip here and also if you have time; have a look at the Sony official website.

As so much of our creative work for Pitney Bowes MapInfo revolves around location intelligence and the power of mapping, I was struck by a new book The Atlas of the Real World. Produced by worldmapper.org, this reference book contains 366 digitally modified maps, known as cartograms. It shows the world in demographics using a wide range of categories from wealth and poverty to Internet use. Here are just a few examples of an atlas of the world as you’ve never seen it before.

Land area

The size of each territory represents its land area in proportion to that of the others. This gives us a very different perspective from the usual Mercator projection we usually see of the world.

Land area

Internet users in 1990

The size of each territory indicates the number of people who were using the Internet way back in 1990. Only 3 million people had access to the Internet then -  73 percent of these were in the United States and 15 percent in Western Europe.

Internet users in 1990

Internet users in 2002

The size of each territory indicates the number of Internet users in the world by 2002. There were 631 million with substantial numbers in Asia-Pacific, Australasia, South Asia, South America, Eastern Europe and China. Hasn’t the world changed?

Internet Users in 2002

The Atlas of the Real World is published by Thames and Hudson