According to the official Google blog Unicode, namely UTF-8, last December became the most frequent encoding for content on the web. Congratulations Unicode! It has been a long, hard way.

I am currently working with Kristina Toutanova and Hisami Suzuki at the Microsoft Research Machine Translation group. I gathered data for them for an upcoming ACL 2008 conference paper and they were nice enough to add me to the author list. You can download the paper here (note that it is copyrighted by Microsoft and the Association for Computational Linguistics).