Now that I’m in Taiwan, I guess I should remove my listing from the NYC Bloggers subway map. Too bad I’m not living in Taipei, then I could be on the MRT Blog:
Unfortunately, it turns out that the MRT blog isn’t a blog at all, but rather a housing development.
Nor is it the only housing development to cash-in on the blogging craze:
While it is easy to make fun of the housing developers for failing to register the domain name they use in their ads, to do so would be like pointing out that Taiwanese have misspellings on their English language T-shirts. The purpose of the URL is for decoration, not information.
Years ago I used to get bubble tea at a stand which had a URL (something like “pearlmilktea.com.tw”) on its banner. I foolishly tried to look at their web site, only to quickly realize my mistake. One can see the trend on Taiwan’s scooters. Where they used to say things like: “We reach for the sky, neither does civilization,” now they are likely to simply have a URL. The cryptic nature of URLs means that you don’t need to worry about your English spelling or grammar, while still conveying the same sense of cosmopolitan modernity.
