You have just created a new Latvian product or service, or have finally made the decision to establish an Internet presence for your Latvian organization, business, hobby or even the family blog. How do you select the domain name?

Lets say that Pēteŗa Pīrāgi, located in Kuldīga, wants to promote its locally popular bakery not only to the rest of Latvia, but to rest of the world. The owner should first sit down (best without a computer) and make a list of words and phrases that people are likely to enter into a search engine such as Google or input as a Web address. For example piragi, pīrāgi (with all the diacritics), Latvian food, beķereja, Latvian bakery, Baltic bacon buns, Baltic food delicacies or visiting Kuldīga. The longer the list the better.

The owner will have two audiences to target: one within Latvia and the Baltic States and the other in the rest of the world. For this reason they may need to go to at least two different registrars: one that handles the .lv domain and the other the popular .com space. The recently introduced European Union .eu top level domain may also be a consideration especially if the owner is expecting an influx of German, Dutch or British tourists to the bakery.

Latvia’s top level domain .lv is managed by the Network Solutions Department of the Institute of Mathematics & Computer Science at the University of Latvia. The department’s Web site is available in either Latvian or English. Visitors can quickly check whether a domain name is available at www.nic.lv. From the list start with the more generic or popular words. You never know your luck, because a previous holder of that name could have recently released it back to the pool of available names. During the 1990s the rules for registering a domain name were fairly lax. At one stage riga.lv was redirecting to a Russian language Web site that had little to do with promoting Rīga. Cybersquatters would often purchase a whole bunch of names with the intent of selling them to unsuspecting firms for many times the original price. Nearly 40,000 .lv domain names have been registered (compared to more than 50 million .com registrations) and the rules today ensure that geographical names and well known company names or trademarks are protected from these warehousing practices. Naming conventions are generally more relaxed and a business or organisation can register at the top domain without the .com.lv or .org.lv extension, for example, mybusiness.lv and myorganisation.lv. Domain names designated with the .id.lv extension are available free of charge for individuals. Surprisingly, a lot of the more popular surnames are still available (only 500 have been registered), so grab one while you can.

Going back to our example, the owner of Pēteŗa Pīrāgi is overjoyed to discover that the No. 1 choice of pirags.lv was available. Out comes the credit card and, after completing all of the necessary details and authorising the USD 35 or EUR 30 charge, the domain name can now be exclusively used by the bakery for 12 months, after which a renewal notice for the same amount will be sent for the following year. In 2004 NIC.lv also introduced the ability to include Latvian letters or diacritics. These domain names are considerably cheaper at LVL 10. The main problem is that for nearly all versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer a special plugin is required to recognise the special letters. Otherwise the user is taken to the standard “Server Not Found” error page. To implement this great idea, the owner of the bakery should have both pirags.lv and pīrāgs.lv for exclusive use and at no additional charge, at least until the technology has caught up and the Domain Name System has become Unicode compliant. NIC.lv provides tūdaliņ.lv as an example to test your Web browser.

For the dot com space Pēteŗa Pīrāgi will need to go to one of the many thousands of registrars located outside of Latvia. Some of the more popular are Register.com, NetworkSolutions and DomainDiscover, where prices start from a low USD 9 for a domain name—nearly 400 percent cheaper than the Latvian equivalent. At these prices Pēteŗa Pīrāgi can register several names, for example, pirags.com, latvianbakery.com and balticbaconbuns.com and have them all automatically redirect to the English language pages of pirags.lv.

The European Commission’s nonprofit organisation EURid has accredited three .eu registrars in Latvia, but only EUREG seems to work and inexplicably defaults to the Russian language. Prices for .eu domain names are quoted at about LVL 15. To date there have been about 3,000 registrations from Latvia. It is not clear whether these figures also includes the reserved names. The owner of Pēteŗa Pīrāgi decides they will watch this space and make an assessment later.

Selecting a domain name is only the initial phase of successfullty establishing an online presence and something that every business should consider sooner than later.

The first Latvian newspaper in decades to be published abroad is aiming to become part of the information diet of the growing number of Latvians living in Ireland.

Called Sveiks!, the tabloid-format biweekly newspaper is published by a Dublin-based company that also puts out newspapers in Lithuanian, Polish and Russian. But unlike earlier emigré Latvian papers, Sveiks! is prepared by journalists who work from editorial offices in Rīga.

The first issue of the colorful tabloid appeared April 27, said co-editor Inga Zaļā.

“The initiative to create the newspaper came from both sides, from Ireland and from Latvia,” Zaļā told me in an e-mail. “The Irish publisher was looking for contacts in Latvia to start publishing a newspaper, while we were looking for contacts to help us realize an idea to create a newspaper. That’s how we met.”

Professional journalists put the paper together in Rīga, and then it is delivered electronically to the publisher in Dublin. There 5,000 copies are printed and distributed for sale around Ireland. Sveiks! sells for EUR 0.99 and is distributed in Eastern European stores in Dublin, Cork, Galway, Sligo and elsewhere.

Five years ago, publisher Sergey Tarutin founded Nasha Gazeta (Our Gazette) for Russians living in Ireland, according to Ireland’s Marketing Magazine. His company now also puts out Lietuvis (The Lithuanian) and Polska Gazeta (Polish Gazette).

The 20-page Sveiks! contains news from Ireland and Latvia, reports about various events, and some features, said Zaļā, who runs the paper along with Liene Akmene. Sections in the paper include politics, society, economy, culture and foreign news. Like many true “immigrant” newspapers, as distinct from “ethnic” newspapers, Sveiks! also provides advice important to Latvian guest workers. Estimates vary, but at least 20,000 Latvians are said to be living and working in Ireland.

Sixty percent of the newspaper is editorial content and 40 percent is advertising. In the long term, that’s a ratio that might work against Sveiks!. To be viable, commercial newspapers typically run more advertising than editorial content.

The fact that the newspaper is prepared by journalists in Rīga rather than Dublin may seem odd, but it’s a model that already is being used by two other Latvian emigré publications. Laiks, the weekly newspaper for Latvians in the United States, moved its editorial and production functions to Rīga from New York in 2002, following the lead of Brīvā Latvija, the European Latvian paper. Only Latvija Amerikā in Canada and Austrālijas Latvietis in Australia are still created in their respective host countries.

Still, the model presents problems, the editors admit.

“Sure, the fact that we are separated (from Ireland) is inconvenient,” Zaļā said, “but we can offer the most important news because some news is sent to us by the publisher and Latvian media use the Internet to follow events in Ireland, so news about Latvians we get from the Latvian wires. We do not yet have permanent correspondents in Ireland, but in time I think we will, because we have cooperation from people who—although they are not professionals—want to write for this publication.”

The paper also has good relations with the recently formed Latvian Society in Ireland.

Sixty years ago, when trained journalists were among the Latvians who ended up in Europe’s Displaced Persons camps, publishing newspapers served an immediate and transitory need. The papers let readers know about what was happening in the camps and, as best they could, about what was happening in occupied Latvia. As the time neared to leave the camps, the papers also offered news about the migration process. When they arrived in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Australia, these journalists continued their work in the face of an uncertain future. The fact that four major exile newspapers still exist is remarkable, even as they struggle with decreasing circulation figures and the question of how to lure young readers.

Whether Sveiks! has potential will be driven by a number of factors. Starting off in Rīga, rather than returning to it, may not necessarily give Sveiks! an edge. If the paper’s potential is to be realized—and if the Latvian population of Ireland continues to grow—I would not be surprised to see at least one editor installed in Dublin.

Given the global trend of young readers to get much of their news from the Internet, Sveiks! will soon have to have an online presence. Sveiks! expects to have its own Web site at some point, the editors told me.

If a miracle occurs or if Latvian politicians finally figure out how to increase wages so that workers are not drawn to distant lands, Sveiks! may not have much of a future at all. If the thousands of Latvians now in Ireland move back, the paper’s readership will disappear. For now, at least, Sveiks! has secured a place in Latvian press history.

In heaven there is no beer, according to a polka classic. If that is true, then I must be living in some sort of Latvian heaven here in Minnesota.

With Jāņi approaching, I thought the right thing to do would be to buy a few bottles of Latvian beer. It should be a simple enough chore, because I had bought Latvian beer in the Minneapolis area before.

But a visit to Surdyk’s, a liquor store in Minneapolis that has a fairly broad selection and where years before I had bought some Latvian brew, proved fruitless. As insurance, I purchased a six-pack of Kalnapilis, one of several Lithuanian beers stocked by the store.

Returning home, I decided to call around. Surely, in a region with 2.5 million people, someone must sell Latvian beer.

I began with Surdyk’s on the chance that I simply had not seen the Latvian section.

Surdyk’s “beer person” replied enthusiastically to my query about the availability of any beers from Latvia.

“Sure, we do! Are you looking for anything in particular?”

Aldaris, I said, figuring that if anything Latvia’s best-known export would ring a bell. It didn’t.

“Doesn’t sound familiar,” the beer person said. But he put me on hold and went to check.

“We carry Švyturys, Uosto… We carry about four,” he assured me upon his return.

Those are Lithuanian beers, I told him, not Latvian.

“Are they, really?” he said. “Well, I guess then we don’t carry any (Latvian beer).”

Asked for suggestions about where a Latvian beer could be found, he recommended a big liquor store in the southern suburb of Burnsville. That led me to the Burnsville branch of the MGM Liquor Warehouse chain.

The manager there double-checked the store’s international section and confirmed that no Latvian beers were available. He suggested Blue Max Liquors, a smaller store in Burnsville that specializes in microbrews and import beers.

But I was shot down by Blue Max, too.

“If we don’t have it, nobody in the Twin Cities will have it,” said the confident woman who answered my call.

The situation looked hopeless. I called a couple of liquor stores in areas of the Twin Cities where Russian immigrants are concentrated, figuring that maybe they might have a wider selection of East European beers.

Finally, one salesperson suggested calling an ethnic food store. Because no Latvian food stores can be found in Minnesota, I called Kiev Foods, an East European store in St. Paul where I have bought Laima chocolates, Lāse milk, šprotes and bread from Latvia.

The woman who answered the phone couldn’t think of any place that might carry Latvian beer, but said she would ask someone else. She rattled off something in Russian to a co-worker, and the only two words I understood were magazin (store) and litovskii (Lithuanian).

“It’s Lithuanian you want?” she asked me, just to be sure.

No, I said with urgency, Latvian, latysh—probably butchering what little I know of the Russian language.

“Continental Liquors,” came the reply. The store is located on the outskirts of St. Paul.

The man with the Eastern European accent at Continental Liquors told me that in the past the store had carried Aldaris, but no more. No distributor in Minnesota carries Latvian beer, therefore no liquor store sells it. The same is true for the delicious Rīgas šampānietis (a sparkling wine made by Latvijas Balzams), which Continental also used to carry. In fact, I was told, the late hockey player Sergejs Žoltoks, who used to play for the Minnesota Wild, sometimes bought his šampānietis there.

So here I sit, a day before Jāņi, staring at a six-pack of Kalnapilis. In Minnesota there is no Latvian beer, that’s why I’m drinking Lithuanian.