Hebrew Internet domain names soon available

Here's a neat little piece of news from late last week.

Hebrew domain names are a-comin'. Cool. Here's the JTA blurb:

All-Hebrew Internet domain names will be available next year for the first time, the body governing domain names announced.

Domain names also will also be available in Mandarin Chinese, Cyrillic and Arabic, the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers said.

Israeli domain names are written now in Latin script and end in .il. There are 154,509 domains with that ending registered with the Internet Corporation.

Rimon Levy, president of the Israel Internet Association, which is responsible for registering domain names with Israel's suffix, told Ha'aretz that the main issue facing Hebrew domain names -- that the language is written from right to left -- has been solved.

The corporation met Oct. 30 in Seoul, South Korea.

Here's ICANN's slick promo video for the new changes coming. Though, I didn't detect Hebrew samples on here in my brief run-through. Also, the freakiy, alien-sounding muzak accompanying the video gets kinda annoying. Just FYI. Still, interesting stuff.