Imagine in the near future, you can have a website address in the form of www.john.doe, www.mary.lovescats, www.government.office and www.summer.vacation.

Whether this will all lead to confusion or it will aid in the direction of an even more semantic web, it remains to be seen. Trademarks on web addresses will be hard to keep up with though. With the 21 top-level domains currently available, many companies choose to register their name with all in order to avoid consumer confusion and fraud. If there where hundreds of possible web address suffixes, that’d be a nearly impossible task to handle.

Among other decisions reached by the ICANN board in Paris, is the future support of other languages in web address extensions. Presently, you can only use 37 roman characters in a web address. Support for Asian, Arabic, Eastern European and Greek scripts should become available once that decision goes into implementation.

According to the ICANN this is the “biggest expansion to Internet in forty years”, and with a constantly growing demand for more websites and domain names, a much awaited for expansion by many.

WHY!?

First thought when I noticed that, was my browser had been hijacked and that I was at a phishing site or fraudulent Google imitator. I think that might have been preferable.

The new favicon used by Google is… so bad, it could almost be characterized “evil”. Come on! Is that the best a company of Google’s gravity can come up with? Who is responsible? A 5 year old using an online favicon maker?

Right, that’s just my opinion. I don’t like it. I wish it would go away. But why should they listen to me, or the voice of reason for that matter? They can even make an animated favicon featuring a purple tortoise belly dancing and get away with it. I am not saying the previous icon was a work of art or something. But at least everyone was familiar with and used to it.

If you can’t make something better, at least don’t make it worse. Please.