Are you familiar with the term 'dot com'?

[Torsten]

Yesterday I saw a commercial on German TV for a new company that is called "Reise Dot Com" (reise.com). Reise is the German word for travel, journey or trip. Now, what strikes me as interesting is the fact that the company name is made of a German word and the English expression "dot com". A German web address is usually read out the German way using the German word for dot (.) and I'm not sure how many Germans actually know what dot com stands for.

So what is your take on this question? How aware are you of so called TDL's -- Top Level Domains? How do you read a web address in your native language? Is the term dot com used in your country?
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[Fan of Arabian horses]

Hi Torsten!

As much as I know DOT is a special term for what us German would say "Punkt" in the "computer-specialist?s language". So for me it isn?t strange to use it. And com just refers to the international web -I?m not really sure about that- like de or eng or many others refer to the nations web.

Also interesting is the spelling of t-online. de, for instance. I mean, some people spells it like t- min- online- dot- de. How about that?

Michael

[bulgarian]

I am from Bulgaria and here we say "dot com" - this is most popular for the people who know english and use Internet.
The people which do not use english and internet usually say the bulgarian name "tochka" (read tochka). Maybe this word is difficult for you but really the bulgarian language is too difficult for foreigners.
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I am from Bulgaria

[Conchita]

The term for 'dot-com' used in Spain is its translation into Spanish: 'punto-com'.

[Yankee]

.
Not surprisingly, dot-com is already listed as both an adjective and a noun in English dictionaries. And I've already seen and heard dot-com being used as a verb. So it may be only a matter of time before dot-com appears in dictionaries as a verb, too.

Amy
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Amy
.
ESL teacher, translator, and a native speaker of American English

[Jamie (K)]

[Conchita]

[mkhraim]

I'm from Jordan (Arab country).
For me i used to react on this matter as an english matter (treating it as a part of the english culture) because it comes first from the USA.
When i was learning on computer the teachers used to translate it from English to Arabic.
But for other people who don't know english i think that they just repeat what they heard with no understanding.
I'm not a programmer but i know that they use the english language not the Arabic language in writing codes.
I think this matter never been discused before from the Arab Language experts.
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MK

[Torsten]

So, how common is the dot com domain in your country? For example, if you ask the average American about the structure of an Internet address, they will most likely say "www.company.com" simply because the dot com TLD is by far the most popular one in the US. It's probably followed by dot net and maybe dot org. University students and professors will also know .edu and more Internet savvy business people have certainly heard of .biz and .info

But what about other people in and from other countries? I know that in Germany the national .de domain is still number one when it comes to popularity and recognition. Most German businesses have prefer to a dot de address over a dot com and I could imagine that the situation is similar in other countries?
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[mkhraim]

Hi there

Here in Jordan. they look at Dot-Jo as a government domain. and this is wrong.

I was working in an advertising company and its local not international. it has a department for designing web sites to our clients upon request from them beside the e-marketing & internet advertisements. my friend who work in that department told me that they prefer to use Dot-Com than Dot-Jo as a prestige beside that misunderstanding of Dot-Jo as a government web site.
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MK

[Torsten]

Hi Mahmoud,

That's very interesting. I've just checked out the website of the Petra News Agency which is hosted at a "dot gov dot jo" domain. So, you are saying that dot jo is less recognized in Jordan than dot com?
Also, gov dot jo is a so called "sub level domain" of dot jo. What about other dot jo sub level domains, is there a dot com dot jo, for example?
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[Hercules]

The time has come...

Let's move this thread to controversial topics ...too



I think that I will see only my name and my subjects there forever ..
" I'm imagining myself as only King there "

GOOD.. GOOD.. GOOD

P.S : If you do that , you will never feel tired.
because there isn't any " hard " pics here which you might remove them too .

Herc
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I Can Go the Distance...

[Jamie (K)]

To complicate things even more, the hosting service I use for the websites I manage allows us to buy .de, .at, .jp, .be, .co.uk, .am and other domains with foreign suffixes. So I could actually set up a website that looks like it's in Germany, Austria, Japan, Belgium, the UK or Armenia, but it's really in the US. This makes sense for companies that want to establish a "local presence" in another country. However, the other people it makes sense for is those who speculate in domain names. There are people who buy domain names that they think someone will need someday, and when someone wants it, they can negotiate a high price.

When I worked in the advertising business -- in the early days of the commercial Internet -- there were people who had registered the brand names of large companies as domain names and then demanded hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars from those companies to transfer the rights to them. Some of them were very unscrupulous, and if they didn't get their price, they'd put up porno sites at those domains so that the companies would have to pay the price just to save their reputations. I think the courts have taken care of that problem now, because I haven't heard anyone talk about it for a long time, but in the mid- and late 1990s it was a very serious problem for many companies.

[Torsten]

Yes, domain grabbing used to be very popular and I think domain trade is still huge business. I remember that business.com was sold at a price of a couple of million dollars. Also, at whitehouse.com used to host a porn site and now it's owned by an online directory. Interestingly enough, whitehouse.org hosts "the officious parody web site of the Executive Branch of the Federal Government of the United States of America" which is really worth reading...
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