2006′s buzzwords poorly understood
Advertisementjapan.internet.com today published the results of a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into the trendy buzzwords of 2006. 330 members of their monitor pool employed in public or private enterprises completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 79.1% were male, 17.9% in their twenties, 44.5% in their thirties, 26.7% in their forties, 9.7% in their fifties, and 1.2% in their sixties.
I read today on Gen Kanai’s blog that Joi Ito has just been appointed chairman of Creative Commons, so with Creative Commons being the most confusing of the words for the Japanese, this survey suggests one issue he may need to approach.
Note that most of the words have come into Japanese either using the English spelling or transliterated into katakana, so that makes it harder for the average person to figure out the meaning. The only one meriting a translation is 集合知, shuugouchi, Wisdom of Crowds, the term that describes Web Two-Point-Zero sites like for instance digg, where the theory goes that the masses will ensure that the most interesting stories will naturally get promoted up to the top of the pile. As one could probably predict, however, the stories that make the front page tend to be those promoted by the top users, and those that attract their attention more often than not are “Top [Ten/Twenty/100] [Tips/Tools/Downloads] for [Linux/Photoshop/iPod]“.
Q1: Select the words from the list below that you’ve often heard of or read about this year. (Sample size=330, multiple answer)
Votes Percentage Blog 267 80.9% SNS 185 56.1% Web 2.0 127 38.5% Podcasting 95 28.8% Long tail 46 13.9% CGM (Consumer Generated Media) 14 4.2% Creative Commons 11 3.3% 集合知, shuugouchi, Wisdom of Crowds 10 3.0% None of the above 30 9.1% Q2: Which of the following words do you not understand the meaning of at all? (Sample size=330, multiple answer)
Votes Percentage Creative Commons 263 79.7% CGM (Consumer Generated Media) 244 67.9% 集合知, shuugouchi, Wisdom of Crowds 242 73.3% Long tail 222 67.3% Podcasting 167 50.6% Web 2.0 134 40.6% SNS 108 32.7% Blog 21 6.4% Understand all to some degree 19 5.8% Q3: Select the products or services from the list below that you’ve often heard of or read about this year. (Sample size=330, multiple answer)
Votes Percentage mixi (Social Networking Service) 260 78.8% YouTube (video sharing) 183 55.5% Skype (internet telephony) 126 38.2% Hatena (social bookmarking, etc) 71 21.5% mylo (PSP-like communicator) 8 2.4% None of the above 42 12.7%
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