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Most of World Missing in World Wide Web
October 21, 2007

We tend to a myopic vision of the relation of the world to media and the Web. In fact, most people aren't online, and perhaps, ahven't seen computers.

There are 1 billion people with access the World Wide Web, but many can't even enter Web addresses in their own alphabets. Web urls are now available in non-Roman alphabets, says World Wide Web manager ICANN (that's the International Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers). About 1 billion people have access to the Web, with 31.2% being English speakers, and 15.7% (second largest group ) Chinese—who still mostly must use Western alphabets to reach addresses.  

 

Russian’s must switch from Cyrillic to add the letters “com” for web addresses. Hindi, Arabic, Persian, Koran, and Japanese are now accommodated. 

The expectation is that the so-called “next billion” wave of Web users will be able to go to Websites by typing in addresses in their native tongues. That still leaves another 4.6 billion people not online. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/print/xx.html

Posted by Bill Esler on October 21, 2007 | Comments (0)