A Chinese couple tried to name their baby '@', claiming the character used in e-mail addresses echoed their love for the child, an official trying to whip the national language into line said on Thursday.

The unusual name stands out especially in Chinese, which has no alphabet and instead uses tens of thousands of multi-stroke characters to represent words.

"The whole world uses it to write e-mail, and translated into Chinese it means 'love him'," the father explained, according to the deputy chief of the State Language Commission Li Yuming. While the '@' simple is familiar to Chinese e-mail users, they often use the English word 'at' to sound it out -- which with a drawn out 'T' sounds something like 'ai ta', or 'love him', to Mandarin speakers.

Li told a news conference on the state of the language that the name was an extreme example of people's increasingly adventurous approach to Chinese, as commercialisation and the Internet break down conventions. Another couple tried to give their child a name that rendered into English sounds like 'King Osrina.'

Li did not say if officials accepted the '@' name. But earlier this year the government announced a ban on names using Arabic numerals, foreign languages and symbols that do not belong to Chinese minority languages. Sixty million Chinese faced the problem that their names use ancient characters so obscure that computers cannot recognise them and even fluent speakers were left scratching their heads, said Li, according to a transcript of the briefing on the government Web site (www.gov.cn).

One of them was the former Premier Zhu Rongji, whose name had a rare 'rong' character that gave newspaper editors headaches.

Source: expressindia.com

Barry Diller may be missing Jeeves, but at least he has Zwinky.

IAC/InteractiveCorp disappointed Wall Street with its second quarter results yesterday, mainly because there haven’t been enough big bands touring, causing a surprising shortfall in IAC’s Ticketmaster unit. Analysts haven’t expected much from IAC’s money-losing Internet media and advertising unit, which includes the Ask.com search engine and Citysearch.com.

The bright spot there, however, was what IAC now calls its FunWebProducts division. This group started as Smiley Central, a service that offers users animated cursors and other graphic bling. Last year, the company introduced Zwinky.com, which lets people create and outfit avatars—images that can represent them on their social network pages. (It’s sort of like an online paper doll program.)

The catch is to use any of these services, you have to download a toolbar that will install in your Web browser that prominently features a box for searches (by, of course, Ask). The advertising revenue from these searches has become a $100 million a year business, said the chief executive of IAC’s consumer applications and portals division, which includes FunWebProducts.

He said Zwinky has turned into a combination of a social network and a virtual world with Zwinktopia, a site on which uses can play games to win Z-bucks with which to by clothes for their avatars. Soon IAC will start selling Z-bucks for real ones. After that, it will sell real versions of the virtual clothing too. (Think Second Life meets IAC’s Home Shopping Network.)

Over at Ask, things aren’t doing quite so well. The site’s redesign in June was a mixed blessing. Jim Lanzone, the chief executive of Ask.com, said in an interview that the that users are responding very well to the new format, which presents images, video and other forms of information alongside a traditional list of Web sites. The problem is Ask’s revenue per search is falling.

“We put so much content on the page, that we are getting fewer paid clicks,” Mr. Lanzone said.

Worse yet, Ask’s new advertising campaign, by badboy agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky (creators of the Burger King Subservient Chicken), simply wasn’t bringing in new searchers. The first wave of ads promoted Ask’s search expertise with incomprehensible billboards that read “The Unabomber hates the algorithm” and “The algorithm Killed Jeeves.” Algorithm, it turns out, is not one of those magic marketing words, like say free. (There is proof: Microsoft has reversed its slide in search share by offering free prizes for people who use its search engine.)

On the conference call yesterday, Mr. Diller, IAC’s chief executive, promised a change. “There is no question given the product and its use, that we do have a compelling product,” he said. “You have got to be more direct in telling people about it which is our plan for the balance of the year.” Already, the ads no longer focus on algorithms, but feature a more direct promotion of Ask’s features. Now they promise “instant gettification.”

For that, they killed Jeeves?

Source: bits.blogs.nytimes.com