Tim got things off to a good start at the JEBsite, with an excellent post about who Zamenhof was and why he created Esperanto. As mentioned in Tim’s post, the most exciting part of the day was that, following a letter campaign from Esperantists who probably didn’t really believe this would ever happen, Google used the Esperanto flag as their themed doodle on a significant number of their national sites. Sadly the UK page wasn’t one of those which sported it, but others, including the German, French and Chinese, proudly displayed it for 24 hours, and you can see a collage of the different pages here

Google wasn’t the only major website, however, to be supporting Esperanto. Not to be outdone, Bing featured this reference to Zamenhof Day on it’s UK homepage, and Wikipedia included a mention of Esperanto in it’s “On this day” feature too

Meanwhile major magazines and newspapers were also getting in on the action. The prestigious German news magazine Stern featured this article on their website (German language only), whilst National Geographic published this offering on theirs. Daily Express even gave Zamenhof a brief mention in a small feature on strange language facts.

Esperantists in the UK were poised to take advantage of the free publicity. Miland Joshi was interviewed about Esperanto on BBC WM (40 minutes into the programme) whilst Stephen Thompson spoke on BBC London (scroll to about 15 minutes in). David Kelso had an interview on Radio Jersey (2 hours 48 minutes in) but it was Brian Barker from Esperanto Lobby who had the busiest day, appearing as he did on both BBC Suffolk (1 hour 11 minutes in) and BBC Devon (41 minutes in).

This is just a quick round-up of the most significant publicity which I noticed. If you become aware of any other successes, please let me know