The Undercover IT Correspondent

GEOGRAPHICALLY-CHALLENGED WEBMASTERS

Why do websites have to have the whole of the UN in the country drop list?

You know, as far as the global village is concerned, there’s such a thing as being too global. When the internet went mainstream in the mid-90s, the world was a pretty predictable place. Web sites implicitly targeted the home country and didn’t even bother displaying a country field on their order forms. When they eventually got round to doing so, the country drop list reflected the economic realities of the time: the major economic powers in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. So if you typed in U, you got familiar names like UK and USA, and F gave you Finland and France. And you got this warm, fuzzy feeling that the world as we knew it was still the same place we grew up in.

But then some webmaster had the brilliantly flawed idea of downloading a list of countries from the UN web site, and in one fell swoop condemned the rest of humanity to having to scroll through places they’d never heard of before, and would probably never set foot in for the rest of their lives. Subsequent webmasters not only matched this dubious feat, but also upped the ante by adding more and more obscure places on the globe, most of which probably didn’t even have a single internet connection! And with the break-up of the USSR and Eastern Europe, this was not a particularly difficult thing to do.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough of this political correctness! The US is the world’s largest economy – and besides, Al Gore invented the Internet – so I say USA should be the first value in the country list when you key in a U. And our friends in Finland and France should be able to hit the F key without having to scroll through exotic places like Fiji and the Faroe Islands (is that where the ancient Egyptian kings are buried?).

After all, just what is the deal here? Why is it of such vital importance to get the country name right for Albania, Afghanistan-Bananastan, the Falklands or the Faroe Islands? What volume of e-commerce shipments are we talking about here? Will Federal Express be unable to deliver the annual book order to Uzbekistan if it is incorrectly spelt (for those who don’t know where Uzbekistan is, it’s next to Kazakhstan)? Will the volume of returned merchandise affect the balance of payments?  Will Amazon’s share price drop because of incorrect forecasting of sales to Burundi and Bhutan? Are there even more than three addresses in all of Antarctica?

No folks, I say these webmasters have got it all wrong. Just as in CRM whereby you want to differentiate between your most profitable customers, webmasters should go back to college (go to college?) to learn about the differences in GNP between Sweden and Somalia. I say we drop all these economically insignificant countries from the lists! Of course, the whole PC movement would be outraged, so I guess we’d have to settle for major countries and the rest of the world (which can be abbreviated to ROW on the screen).

Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against webmasters– some of my best friends have webmaster friends. But I think it’s time we all did the electronic equivalent of shouting from our windows like in the movie Network, and send an email to all these webmasters to the effect that ‘we’re mad as hell and we’re not gonna take it any more!’

MG