Personal vs Technology

Have you ever heard ‘a country’ named Ålands Islands? Pronounced IPA:[’oːland], it is actually part of Finland and even has .ax as its own Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD). According to its Wikipedia page, Ålands Islands an archipelago in the Baltic Sea. It is situated at the entrance to the Gulf of Bothnia and forms an autonomous, demilitarised, monolingually Swedish-speaking administrative province of Finland.

The fact about Ålands according this, are:

• consists of more than 6,500 islands and skerries, of which 6,400 are larger than 3,000 m2
• the longest distance from north to south is 50 km and from east to west 45 km
• 912 km of public roads
• current population of 26,200 live on only 65 islands
• over 40 percent live in the only town, Mariehamn

What about the domain? The excerpt is taken from this:

On February 17, 2006, the Finnish parliament approved a modification of the laws regulating Finnish domain names to include the .ax top-level domain. During a three year period, the aland.fi subdomain will be phased out while .ax will be used in parallel; no new registrations under the aland.fi subdomain will be accepted, and all current owners of domains under the aland.fi subdomain will receive registrations for the corresponding .ax domain.

On March 17, 2006, Finnish president Tarja Halonen signed the bill into law, effective as of March 27, 2006. The government of Åland began accepting registrations immediately following the changing of the law.

On June 9, ICANN approved delegating the .ax top-level domain to the government of Åland. The .ax domain was added to the root zone on June 21, 2006, and became active on August 15, 2006.

If we search on Google (as on 18 April 2007), seems like there are still only few sites using the domain, among them are TV Åland, Åland Polytechnic, Ålandstrafiken (about ferries and bus traffic), and Statistics and Research Åland (You can even get the statistics of 295 baby born in 2006 in HERE ). Most of the sites are still using old domain *.aland.fi.

More pictures of Åland can be viewed on this page.