世論 What Japan Thinks

japan.internet.com published the results of goo Research’s 25th regular survey into blogging. Every month since April 2004 they have looked into the blogging market, and the highlights from this April’s results are presented below. They interviewed 1,068 people from their monitor group by means of a private internet-based questionnaire. 57.1% of the sample was female, and 2.4% were in their teens, 26.6% in their twenties, 40.1% in their thirties, 20.7% in their forties, 7.7% in their fifties, and 2.5% sixty years old or older.

The huge number choosing to remain anonymous is rather surprising to me, and I’d like to find out about what sort of blogs people are hiding behind. Perhaps a further study on this matter is in order.
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japan.internet.com, in conjuction with JR Tokai Express Research, looked at the use of affiliate schemes by bloggers and web page maintainers. They surveyed 330 people employed in public or private businesses; 86.1% of the sample was male, 10.6% were in their twenties, 33.3% in their thirties, 38.2% in their forties, 15.2% in their fifties, and 2.7% in their sixties. Note that perhaps people who are ranking in vast sums of money from blogging wouldn’t be wasting their time filling in surveys for the chance of a few yen off a Green Car seat!

The survey did not mention how “affiliate” was defined; obviously sponsored links like with Amazon Associates would fall under this category, but as to whether AdSense (click that button on the left to find out more!) is also included, this survey does not clarify. Just for the sake of disclosure, at the rate I’m going at, my target for the year is in the 5,000 to 10,000 yen range (yes, just one hundred bucks!) although I had a bumper month last month where I managed to raise more than my hosting fee!
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Recently, japan.internet.com, in conjuction with goo Research, published the results of a study into the use of web site analysis tools. They interviewed by means of an internet-based questionnaire 1,085 people from all over the country. The sample demographics was 46.4% male, with 2.6% in their teens, 23.1% in their twenties, 39.7% in their thirties, 24.8% in their forties, and 9.8% in their fifties.

As I have previously mentioned, I have three metrics tools; the two public ones linked from the sidebar for Performancing Metrics and SiteMeter plus the back-end statistics packages for analysing my server logs; I prefer the AwStats tool of the three or four available. I’m on the waiting list for Google Analytics, if it ever opens to the public again, and just a couple of days ago I also heard about an extremely interesting new tool, Crazy Egg, that seems to do a thermal imaging-like heat map to highlight exactly where people are clicking on your page. It looks very interesting, although for a blog with an ever-changing variable-width middle column, I’m not sure what will happen, but no doubt they’ve thought of that issue. I’d love to see the results for a typical blog with an enormously long blogroll, as I wonder which of them get clicked. As you might have noticed, I just have a short randomly ordered blogroll.
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japan.internet.com recently released an opinion poll, performed in conjuction with goo Research, to see what people thought about the novelisation (or novelization, if you prefer) of blogs and other web contents. 1,013 people completed their internet-based questionnaire, with 60.4% female. 27.0% of the respondents were in their twenties, 42.7% in their thirties, 23.9% in their forties, and 6.4% in their fifties.

When a similar survey was carried out a year ago, during the height of the “Densha Otoko” boom, 35.0% of the people surveyed then said they would want to buy a novelisation of a blog.

I can’t say I’ve come across any blogs I’d like to see as a book, although having said that I don’t follow any regular diary-like narrative-based blogs, which would seem to be the best material for making into a book.
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japan.internet.com, in conjunction with JR Tokai Express Research, carried out an internet-based survey of 330 people employed by national and local government, and by private enterprises to find out how well they knew various English computer-related buzzwords and acronyms. The sample was 72.7% male, with 23.0% in their twenties, 42.7% in their thirties, 24.8% in their forties, 9.1% in their fifties, and just 0.3% aged sixty or over. Note that those interviewed are not necessarily IT specialists, or even IT users, in their workplace.

Note that the questions are testing to see how confident the respondents are in their knowledge, not if they are correct or not. I do remember one incident at work regarding the GPL (actually, I remember lots of incidents with lots of technical terms) where one senior person was holding forth at length and with great confidence about a certain aspect of it but was, in fact, talking utter cobblers.

I’m rather surprised at FTTH scoring almost double of RSS and SNS, though. As far as I am aware, FTTH is rarely used in advertising for high-speed home internet access; it is usually just fibre-optic (光ファイバー, hikari faiba-) or NTT’s trademark B-FLET’S (B for Broadband, F for “flat rates, friendly Internet access, and a flexible environment”, and “Let’s” for “Let’s IP Service”).

How well do you do in knowing these terms?
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[part 1] [part 2]

Over four days at the end of November and start of December last year, goo Research carried out a closed internet-based survey of 2,207 businesspeople to find out about the use of intra-company communication tools and blogs, and other related matters.

Note that this survey was carried out before probably the most famous Japanese blogging CEO became an ex-president and an ex-blogger, so I wonder how the answers to the questions in this second half would change if this survey were repeated today.

One thing I noticed from the company I worked for’s attempt to introduce a community was that a cheerleader or evangelist is needed to help get the ball rolling. Although the next survey question suggests that over half the people want to see management backing, the backing in itself is not the key, I don’t think, it is that the bosses should also be in the vanguard, otherwise there may be a tendency for the whole think to just fizzle out.
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[part 1] [part 2]

Over four days at the end of November and start of December last year, goo Research carried out a closed internet-based survey of 2,207 businesspeople to find out about the use of intra-company communication tools and blogs, and other related matters.

This is one subject I’d love to wax lyrical on, but sadly I suspect I’d probably get sacked if my boss read what I want to say! Suffice to say I am unaware of a blog by our prez; most of his communications are by PDF files. About a year ago we did try to introduce a community-based service that failed, perhaps partially due to it being seen as a gaijin thing, but more importantly … I’d better self-censor this post now.

The main problem people report is regarding information overload; either simply too much data or inability to highlight the new information. Interestingly, almost two-thirds are interested in work-related blogs, yet only just over half are interested in a community site, although the survey does not make clear what definition of “community” was used.
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On the 27th of January, japan.internet.com, in conjunction with goo Research, published their 23rd survey on blogging. 1,076 people from all around the country and of all ages completed the internet-based questionnaire. 42.3% were male, 3.4% teenagers, 24.4% in their twenties, 38.0% in their thirties, 24.4% in their forties, and 9.7% fifty or over.

See also the recent story from Mutant Frog to understand the Japanese blogosphere a bit better. I find it interesting that over 70% have had a trackback, but less than 40% have made one. I wonder how these figures compare with other countries? Mutant Frog suggested that the Japanese blog world is mostly ignorant of the world outside its borders. Are many of the bloggers also blogging purely for themselves? Of course another factor is that people may not be aware that their blogging platform automatically trackbacks any links.
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MyVoice conducted a survey into the use of MP3 players, especially in relation to Podcasting amongst 15,525 members (60% female) of their MyVoice community at the start of November.

I’m not much of a Podcast fan myself (although I have an idea for one for here…) nor a portable player owner, so I have never got into the whole idea at all, so I suppose I’m glad to see that four in five are in some degree of ignorance of the whole subject, and, barely four in one hundred have actually listened to one! Comparing the figures for Japan with those for other countries may be an interesting line of research, however, which I should do sometime soon. In fact, I am thinking of writing a regular column on survey analysis, so watch this space to see what develops.
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goo Research, in cooperation with japan.internet.com, carried out their 20th survey on blogging in Japan. Note that I have previously translated their 19th survey. Since the number with blogs and the number commenting on blogs have both increased by a factor of six, I wonder if there is a causative relationship here; is genuine interest in the blogosphere increasing people’s urge to post, or is it just blatant self-promotion for ones blog? For me, it’s a combination of the two!

They surveyed 1,083 people, 41.09% male, 1.94% 19 or under, 27.98% in their 20s, 39.24% in their 30s, 19.94% in their 40s, and 10.90% fifty or older.

Q: In the last month, have you viewed a blog? (Sample size=1,083)

Yes	76.36%
No	17.27%
Don’t really know what a blog is	6.37%

The people who have viewed a blog has basically tripled in the last year and a half, and the don’t knows have dropped over six-fold from 40.80% since that very first survey.

As for what sort of blogs people are usually reading, the most popular answer was the bog-standard daily life blogs, at 39.90%, followed by no theme in particular at 32.04%, with film and music blogs third, way back at 16.93%.

Q: Have you posted a comment on a blog site? (Sample size=827)

Yes	28.05%
No	71.95%

This percentage is over double the number in the first survey 18 months ago, and allowing for the fact that over three times the number of people are now reading blogs, this represents an increase of a factor of six in the raw percentage of blog posters.

Q: In the last month, which blog service provider’s blogs have you visited? (Sample size=827, multiple answer)

Kokorogu	26.00%
Hadena diary	34.22%
My profile	4.72%
Blog people	6.77%
Livedoor blog	44.38%
excite blog	27.21%
Doblog	5.93%
gooBLOG	36.40%
WebryBlog	5.08%
Blogzine	3.63%
JUGEM	8.59%
SeesaaBLOG	7.86%
Yahoo! BLOGS	46.07%
yaplog	16.08%
Ameba Blog	26.12%
Rakuten Blog	34.70%
MSN Spaces	9.67%

Interesting that the above are all Japanese-based services.

Q: Have you made your own blog? (Sample size=1,083)

Yes	31.86%
No, but I want to try sometime	29.46%
No, and I don’t want to	32.23%
Don’t really know what a blog is	6.46%

The percentage with blogs or planning to make blogs has basically doubled in the last year and a half. Those respondents currently with blogs has increased by a factor of six. Most people have just one blog service account, at 66.09%, but the number with two or more has over doubled since the very first survey. However, although the number of blogs has increased, the percentage updating their blogs at least weekly has dropped 2.5% to 60.00%, but since the number of bloggers has increased six-fold, this drop is perhaps not significant. As for why people create a blog, the main reason is people wanting to keep a notebook, at 57.68%.

Q: Has your blog had a trackback? (Sample size=345)

Yes	70.43%
No	29.57%

Q: Have you done a trackback on another site? (Sample size=345)

Yes	37.10%
No	62.90%