J. O'Conner

Hi there again,

This is just a quick note to say thank you for reading this blog. Internationalization is definitely a favorite topic of mine. The problem is that I enjoy so many topics that sometimes I don’t stay focused.

To help with that, I’m asking you to make suggestions. What would you like to read about here? What globalization topics interest you the most? What topics do you have trouble finding information about on the web or in your favorite magazine. I’m here to help you of course, but I get a lot out of researching material too!

Have a great weekend!

Recently I came across a W3C document about times, dates, and time zones. The document claims that only 20 countries observe more than one time zone. The United States is in that list. Can you name the rest of them?

I’ll post the answers to this question tomorrow! Until then, which countries do you think have more than one time zone?

P.S. Please provide your answers as comments!

No matter how many times it happens, I still feel somewhat surprised that companies still don’t know how to gather form data, move it through their database and use it without destroying something as simple as a name. My most recent surprise came just today, this time from Ford Motor Company.

Apparently I had filled out an online form and included my name. Unfortunately, Ford didn’t quite know what to do with the apostrophe in my family name. They turned it into a form similar to an html character entity reference but they seem to have scrubbed out the semi-colon from the “'” reference. Here’s the US postal address they used to reach me recently.

Aah, when will they learn?

After several years away from full-time internationalization work, I’m happy to announce a significant change. I am working as the Media Globalization Architect at Yahoo. This is a dream job for me, and one that will definitely be challenging.

My primary globalization experience has been gained through developing internationalization frameworks and APIs, particularly for the Java platform. Sure, I’ve also worked to define best practices for Java EE apps as well, but never on the scale of Yahoo’s media properties! And that’s exciting.

I hope you’ll join me here in this blog from time to time as I write about some of my experiences as a Globalization Yahoo! I haven’t educated myself on Yahoo’s corporate blogging policy, but I do know that I’m tasked with developing and maintaining thought leadership in the globalization arena, particularly for web-based media. So it doesn’t seem unreasonable to share some of my ideas and experiences here.

Until next time,
John O.