世論 What Japan Thinks

2 Channel is the bulletin board system that mkes all the news in Japan, usually for all the wrong reasons! It is a cess-it, albeit an extremely popular cess-pit, always ready to pounce on the latest scandal and spread much muck, along with the all to rare smidgeon of truth. To learn more about what people get out of these boards, japan.internet.com recently published the results of a survey by JR Tokai Express Research on the very topic of internet bulletin board usage.

Demographics

On the 16th of May 2007 JR Tokai Express Research interviewed 330 people by means of a private internet-based questionnaire. 54.5% of the sample was female, 22.4% in their twenties, 36.7% in their forties, 23.9% in their forties, 10.9% in their fifties, and 6.1% in their sixties.

About the only bulletin board I’m active on these days is the Digital Point forums.
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Having heard a little about people accessing blogs and Social Networking Services (SNSs) from mobile phones, I obtained a lot of useful information from a recently-published report from infoPLANT on a survey they conducted into the use of blogs and SNSs from mobile phones and personal computers.

Demographics

Between the 15th and 22nd of May 2007 3,709 people self-selected themselves to complete a public survey offered through the NTT DoCoMo iMode menuing system. 61.9% of the sample was female.

This is one of those surveys that made me quite literally gasp! Although I know that the self-selecting nature of infoPLANT polls does bias towards heavy mobile phone users on unlimited plans, with the percentage of people on these kinds of plans increasing all the time, perhaps these figures suggest a general trend away from the computer and towards the mobile phone as the main portal for accessing the internet.
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Sadville, as The Register is wont to call it, will be released on a mostly unsuspecting Japanese audience this summer. Although some Japanese companies have already set up virtual shop in the Second Life metaverse, with the new headquarters for mixi (the giant Japanese Social Networking Service) even featuring on prime-time news, until now only an English-langauge client has been available for Japanese users. In antcipation of the imminent client release, japan.internet.com reported on the start of a new series of surveys by goo Research on this very topic, Second Life.

Demographics

Between the 28th and 30th of May 2007 goo Research interviewed 1,102 members of its internet monitor group. 53.0% of the sample was male, 17.0% in their teens, 20.9% in their twenties, 18.0% in their thirties, 16.8% in their forties, and 27.3% aged fifty or older.

I won’t be found in Second Life, as my rather ancient PC does not have the required horsepower, and I have enough going on in my First Life to not require an escape to a Second.

New visitors might also be interested in a survey on virtual world English lessons and an awareness study on Second Life.

It also seems that Sony plan to release their own similar world, called “Home”, and TransCosmos and other companies are planning one called “meet-me”.
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japan.internet.com reported on the start of a new series of regular surveys being conducted by goo Research on the subjet of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Demographics

Over the 14th and 15th of May 2007, goo Research interviewed by means of a private internet-based questionnaire 1,087 members of its monitor panel. 47.1% of the sample was female, 11.7% in their teens, 21.3% in thier twenties, 19.4% in their thirties, 18.4% in their forties, and 29.2% in their fifites.

I think my opinion of Wikipedia is best expressed by the Wikipedia Nofollow WordPress plugin I developed. I feel it pollutes search results as bloggers tend to lazily quote it as it is the handiest reference, reinforcing its strength and putting it on top of Google searches for far too many keywords. In addition, with its nofollow policy, it doesn’t acknowledge its sources in the eyes of search engines, thus strengthening its position in the search engine optimisation wars.
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of a survey conducted by goo Research on the subject of email.

Demographics

Between the 18th and 19th of May 2007 1,084 members of goo Research’s internet monitor group successfully completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.1% of the sample was male, 16.9% in their teens, 19.6% in their twenties, 18.2% in their thirties, 17.2% in their forties, 17.1% in their fifties, and 11.2% aged sixty or older.

I have at least five main mail addresses, or eight if I include three mainly spam-collecting Gmail accounts, although all these accounts get read through Becky!. Spam is probably about 25 per day (Gmail silently swallows some huge amount, I suspect), although if I only count those missed by SpamAssassin, it’s closer to five to ten.
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japan.internet.com recently published a summary of a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research on the topic of company internal blogs and Social Networking Services (SNS).

Demographics

330 members of JR Tokai Express Research’s online monitor group in salaried employment successfully completed a private internet-based survey between the 8th and 10th of May 2007. 69.7% of the group was male, 18.2% in their twenties, 44.8% in their thirties, 24.8% in their forties, 8.8% in their fifties, and 3.3% in their sixties.

I always find it difficult to comment on these sorts of surveys as I fear I might stray too far into criticism of my employer, so I’ll not bore you with my experiences with groupware activities at my place of work.

There will be a significant difference, I think, between the availability figures in Q1 and the actual usage figures by either the respondent or others at the company, but sadly that is not reported.

For reference, I previously translated goo Research’s more detailed look at company internal communication issues.
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of a survey conducted by Cross Marketing Inc on one of the latest tools that has been causing something of a buzz around the English-language blogging world, namely Twitter. Twitter is an application that allows short messages to be posted to mini-blog and a group of listeners, perhaps a bit like a Web2.0 blog and RSS and instant messenger combined, with a bit of SMS thrown in for good measure.

Demographics

Over the 9th and 10th of May 2007 Cross Marketing interviewed 300 members of its internet monitor panel. The sample was split into regular sized groups: 20.0% in their teens, 20.0% in their twenties, 20.0% in their thirties, 20.0% in their forties, and 20.0% in their fifties. Each age group was also split evenly into 30 male and 30 female respondents.

I’ve not used Twitter and have no plans to myself, as my impression is that most of the users are people wedded to their internet connection posting about the trivial things in their daily lives with worryingly high frequency, perhaps like a grown-up version of MySpace.
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into the use of IP phones.

Demographics

330 members of JR Tokai Express Research online monitor group employed in the private or public sector completed a private survey conducted on the 21st of April 2007. 62.4% were male, 15.8% in their twenties, 49.4% in their thirties, 26.7% in their forties, 6.7% in their fifties, and 1.5% in their sixties.

The main promoter of IP phones (and the biggest provider of “free” wireless connections in Japan, but that’s another story!) is Yahoo! BB, who can often be found in front of railway stations and the like thrusting ADSL routers into the hands of unsuspecting passers-by for them to use as both internet connection ports and as telephones. Their service allows free calls to other Yahoo! BB users, and almost all standard phones can just plug straight into their routers.
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japan.internet.com recently reported on a survey conducted between the 26th and 28th of April by goo Research into the trustworthiness of internet information.

Demographics

1,041 members of goo Research’s online monitor group successfully completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 51.8% of the sample was male, 18.9% in their teens, 22.8% in their twenties. 19.9% in their thirties, 19.4% in their forties, and 19.0% in their fifties.

The results here really took me aback! Commercial blogs, which by definition are trying to sell you stuff, top the charts, whereas CEO blogs are the least trusted, even though the CEO has a legal obligation (I hope, at least) to tell the truth (or at least not lie) or face prison whereas commercial blogs are trying to sell you stuff and will always tell you how they are better than brand X.

Note that Q1 should really be phrased as “Have you ever obtained information that you determined was incorrect?”

Sadly, this time the presented results fail to directly mention anything about trust in Wikipedia.
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japan.internet.com recently reported on a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into mobile phone web browser awareness issues. The article reported on here focused mainly on mobile search.

Demographics

Between the 20th and 23rd of April 2007 330 PC using members of JR Tokai Express Research’s monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 54.8% of the sample was female, 18.2% in their twenties, 40.9% in their thirties, 27.0% in their forties, 10.3% in their fifties, and 3.6% in their sixties.

I’ve only used mobile search once or twice just to see how it worked, and I used Google’s mobile portal to do the search. It was relatively successful, and it also offered a railway timetable look-up service specifically for Japan, but even though I was using a new Japanese mobile phone, the encoding was all wrong and I just for question marks instead of kanji. Since that experiment, however, I’ve never had the urge to search again.

Note that the “full browser” mentioned in Q1 refers to using a browser that attempts to render standard web pages completely. I’m not sure what the exact qualifications for a full browser is, but I would expect CSS, Javascript and frames at least to be supported. Note that this site can render in some of the newer non-full standard mobile phone browsers, and commenting even works, but all my CSS and Javascript elements are not rendered. Also note that some mobile phones come with full browsers as standard, but for other phones a separate browser needs to be downloaded. In addition, NTT DoCoMo call their service “Full Browser”, au’s is “PC Site Viewer”, and SoftBank’s is “PC Site Browser”.
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