Chinese IDN promotion at Olympics

[dusty]

The Beijing Olympics are August 8 thru August 24 2008.

Would this be a good time and place to promote Chinese IDN websites?

I am thinking really grass roots stuff. T-shirt giveaways and other shameless promotions.

Possibly arrive in Beijing June 2008 and take advantage of local resources for some fast development of content as well as a marketing game plan for the event.

Just throwing this out there in case anyone wants to collaborate, shoot the idea down, or offer suggestions.

[touchring]

Great idea, but would depend very much on IE7.

IMO, any promotion to the public (note, public - man on the street) before IE7 is widespread will not produce good results. Verisign plugins and tricks cannot be relied on as the korean experience has shown.

I think M$ wants users in Asia to upgrade to Vista and so holding back IE7 auto upgrade. But since Vista will not work with the majority of software applications, this will take more than just a few months to happen. Even for windows 2003, which is basically a 2000 with a different GUI, it takes 4 years for wipespread use.

I think the best thing we can do our part right now is to convert our minisites to real websites to improve end user experience, like what guru is doing.

[markits]

Sounds great. Would love to know more about your collaboration plan.

[dusty]

Sounds great. Would love to know more about your collaboration plan.

At the moment I am working on acquiring more quality names. I think I have one or two that are good enough for development at this early stage. My partial list is here: http://www.中.com/IDN-list.html One or two at the top of that list will most likely have my initial attention unless I find something better between now and next June. At the very least a few months in Beijing will allow me to assess the situation, establish contacts and do some serious development. Collaboration could simply involve sharing information, contacts, encouragement or go as far as partnership in some cases.

I understand the AU IE7 issue is a hold up, but still believe my time spent in Beijing will not be a waste.

Maybe this post was a little early. I will post again on the topic in about 8 months.

best,
Dusty

[touchring]

I understand the AU IE7 issue is a hold up, but still believe my time spent in Beijing will not be a waste.


Weather.cn is good for development. Maybe you should start with that, users without IE7 will still be able to access your domain by "web navigation" - if it still works now.

Or you might also want to create an ascii like tianqi333.cn, forwarded to the IDN, and advertise both at the same time. On the website itself, you show idn and ascii on the header in animated GIF - like kakaku.com - i'm planning to do this with one of my names. :)