Speaking in tongues

If your global web site is not available in Spanish already, it will need to be pretty soon. Spanish and Mandarin Chinese, Bengali and Hindi.

American media companies are finding that Hispanic web sites are hot properties at the moment, although not all of them are presented entirely in Spanish.

That's because the US Hispanic population is growing, and getting online, faster than any other ethnic group.

Major players like Yahoo, which already has a site in Spanish, and eBay, which is thinking hard about it, have taken the first steps. As with many online trends, where the big boys go, the rest will follow.

And it's not just Spanish they should all be thinking about. The top-five most spoken languages in the world are Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, English, Bengali and Hindi (according to Infoplease.com), so it makes sense that global internet players will have to think about these languages too.

More fun on the horizon for the designers of content management systems, then.