RU-CENTER, the Russian Network Information Center, has launched RUCLID (Russian Cultural and Linguistic Internet Domains), an initiative for the introduction of top level domains intended for cultural and linguistic communities living in Russia.RU-CENTER believes RUCLID will help local communities better express their culture and languages on the Internet. Any top-level domain introduced as a part of RUCLID will be strictly associated with a particular community.In the long run this will strengthen presence and awareness of local communities in the Web, increase the number of target audience on their websites.”With the acceptance of the new gTLD process any community will have great opportunity to be presented in DNS. And as Russia is multinational country we’ve decided to bring this chance closer to local cultural and linguistic communities. We hope that RUCLID will become one of the ways of saving the identity for small nationalities living in Russia”, said Andrey Vorobiev, head of external relations and communications at RU-CENTER.To support RUCLID a special community movement was formed. It is opened for participation to any organisation or individual from Russia. The main goal of the movement is to promote the idea of the cultural and linguistic TLDs’ implementation in general and to attract more nationalities to participate in the process with their own top-level domain.In 2011 RUCLID will be widely promoted in Russia. The main presentation of the project is planned for the Russian Internet Forum – the biggest local Internet conference that will be held in the end of April 2011. Also RUCLID will be introduced in many Russian regions during special Electronic Future festival that is organised by Russian Agency for Information Society Development.”We’ve launched RUCLID looking at foreign experience in this sphere. I mean ECLID, the organisation for European cultural and linguistic domains introduction. And we hope to collaborate with our colleagues from Europe to make the idea of cultural and linguistic TLDs more popular as well as to promote it in ICANN,” said Sergey Gorbunov, senior PR manager for international projects at RU-CENTER.For more information, see ruclid.org.