Netiquette IQ Technical Term Of The Day - Unicode

Most of us have heard the term Unicode. However, many of us may not have a clear and true definition of it. So, here you are!
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Unicode is a universal character encoding standard. It defines the way individual characters are represented in text files, web pages, and other types of documents.

Unlike ASCII, which was designed to represent only basic English characters, Unicode was designed to support characters from all languages around the world. The standard ASCII character set only supports 128 characters, while Unicode can support roughly 1,000,000 characters. While ASCII only uses one byte to represent each character, Unicode supports up to 4 bytes for each character.

There are several different types of Unicode encodings, though UTF-8 and UTF-16 are the most common. UTF-8 has become the standard character encoding used on the Web and is also the default encoding used by many software programs. While UTF-8 supports up to four bytes per character, it would be inefficient to use four bytes to represent frequently used characters. Therefore, UTF-8 uses only one byte to represent common English characters. European (Latin), Hebrew, and Arabic characters are represented with two bytes, while three bytes are used to Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and other Asian characters. Additional Unicode characters can be represented with four bytes.

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In addition to this blog, I maintain a radio show on BlogtalkRadio  and an online newsletter via paper.li.I have established Netiquette discussion groups with Linkedin and  Yahoo.  I am also a member of the International Business Etiquette and Protocol Group and Minding Manners among others. I regularly consult for the Gerson Lehrman Group, a worldwide network of subject matter experts and I have been contributing to the blogs Everything Email and emailmonday . My work has appeared in numerous publications and I have presented to groups such as The Breakfast Club of NJ and  PSG of Mercer County, NJ.

I am the president of Tabula Rosa Systems, a “best of breed” reseller of products for communications, email, network management software, security products and professional services.  Also, I am the president of Netiquette IQ. We are currently developing an email IQ rating system, Netiquette IQ, which promotes the fundamentals outlined in my book.

Over the past twenty-five years, I have enjoyed a dynamic and successful career and have attained an extensive background in IT and electronic communications by selling and marketing within the information technology marketplace.Anyone who would like to review the book and have it posted on my blog or website, please contact me paul@netiquetteiq.com.

If you have not already done so, please view the trailer for my book below. 

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