Amusing story of the day:

Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has not declared his intention to run in the 2008 presidential election, but a “President Ma” Web site has appeared on the Internet, chronicling his remarks and handicapping the election.

The interesting bit (for me at least) was the address of this website:

http://president.ma/

Now, you’ve got to admit that’s a good address: Simple, to the point, and easy to remember. (It’s also not cheap – costing around US$100 a year just for the name). Normally, a website would either be associated with a country (i.e. blahblahblah.com.tw for Taiwan) or international (something.com or .org). To get ‘president.ma’, the owners of this website have actually registered a name which is reserved for Morocco (.ma is short for Maroc, which is what French-speaking Morocco calls itself).

Ma Ying-jeou as President of Morocco? Seems a bit unlikely to me. Luckily Morocco is a monarchy, with a prime minister but no president, so they’re unlikely to call demanding their name back.

P.S. While I found this news slightly amusing, you’ve got to wonder what it’s doing on the front page of the Taipei Times. Slow news day, or just getting really desperate to find something to embarrass Ma with? No, don’t answer that one …

P.P.S. It is actually quite common for people to register web addresses with odd countries because it sounds good – for example Tuvalu has a little industry selling off ‘.tv’ to television companies.