Information Technology experts on Saturday attributed the low turnout in registering websites in Jordan's Arabic top-level domain الاردن.(alordon) to being 'unnecessary' and weak promotion for the service. The experts said the service is not expected to witness any growth in usage but a 'huge' promotional campaign might attracts hundreds of websites to use the domain. 'The service does not add any value. I do not think Internet users will find it difficult to type a few letters in English to access a certain website.
Therefore, there is no need to type in Arabic letters,' Mahmoud Al Kurdi, sales and marketing manager at Virtuport, told The Jordan Times Saturday. 'If a person does not even know how to type the address of a certain website in English letters, he or she can type in Arabic letters on Google and search for the website. I see no point in typing address in Arabic letters. It is not convenient,' he said. 'Maybe when there is a proper campaign and more people know about it, the service will spread,' he added. Abed Shamlawi, CEO of ICT Association of Jordan ' int@j, echoed similar remarks.
'People, even those who do not speak English, are used to typing addresses of sites in English letters. Typing the address of a site in English letter takes just a few words, it is not like writing a page in English,' he said. 'Not many people know about the service. When there is a proper promotional campaign, maybe more companies will be interested to register; otherwise, the service has no future in the short-term,' he told The Jordan Times Saturday. 'People are used to typing in English letters.
The service is not very common in other Arab states. In Qatar, however, there is a huge promotion for the service and still turnout is not large,' he said. National Information Technology Centre General Manager Nabeel Fayoumi, whose agency launched the service, attributed the 'weak' turnout on the service to lack of awareness and added that the centre is working on a campaign to be launched by the end of this year.
According to Fayoumi, some 150 websites belonging to public and private entities have registered their domains in Arabic since its introduction in October 2010. Jordan is one of eight Arab states that launched the top-level domain in Arabic. In Internet parlance, top-level domains, or TLDs, are the last label of a fully qualified domain name and the end of a URL, according to web sources. Common TLDs include .com, .org, .net, and Latin-alphabet country codes like .jo.
