Every now and then, people ask me what new areas I am looking into.  If you read my blog posts, you can generally get a feel for this. 

One new area of interest for me is what I’ll call the “Internationalization of the Web”.  It’s a pretty broad bucket of stuff. Basically, I think most web services based in the US focus on serving their core US users well.  This was largely the product philosophy at Ebay, and it only makes sense when you are based in the US, your customers are mostly from the US, and most advertisers focus on US customers.

As a result, I think international traffic is generally an afterthought.  But if you look at the stats of any modereately sized site, it’s remarkable to see how much traffic comes from other countries (and many where English is not the native langauge).  

There is definitely an opportunity here to seamlessly make sites more usable for foreign visitors and to monetize their traffic better.

Disclaimer: My friend Amar Goel first tipped me off to this idea over a year ago.  Guess I’m a little slow 🙂