世論 What Japan Thinks

ITmedia News recently reported on some research by Video Research Interactive into where F1 women (F1 just seems to be the marketing code-word for the women between the ages of 20 to 34) spend their time on the internet. There were two sets of figures recorded; one on which sites had the biggest percentage of F1 women, and which sites had the largest absolute numbers of F1 visitors. The data was collected over an unstated period, but I suspect it was for all of 2006.

It’s perhaps interesting to note that mixi has a significantly high number of young women users. I’m also rather surprised to see Geocities as the seventh overall most popular site in Japan. I thought the US version, at least, was basically dead.
Read the rest of this entry »

japan.internet.com recently reported on a survey with a slightly odd topic conducted by goo Research regarding receiving mail from MAILER-DAEMON. Just in case you are wondering what this is, legitimate replies from the legitimate MAILER-DEMON means that mail counldn’t be delivered, but often spam or viruses use fake MAILER-DEMON messages to try to get past filters.

Demographics

Between the 9th and 11th of March, 1,072 members of the goo Research monitor group successfully completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 51.8% of the sample were male, 25.3% in their twenties, 23.0% in their thirties, 22.4% in their forties, 21.4% in their fifties, and 8.0% in their sixties.

In Q1SQ3 about three in five read MAILER-DAEMON messages at least some of the time, yet it is one of the vectors of spam and viruses. Note that for some reason most Japanese MAILER-DAEMONs speak in English, and only very rarely does Japanese feature, even in my employer’s internal system, even though it seems like all you need to do is to provide a simple template file for the new error message, in the case of Postfix at least. Does it incorrectly handle Japanese and other double-byte characters, I wonder?
Read the rest of this entry »

japan.internet.com recently published the results of some research conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into Internet Explorer v7.0. 330 members of their online monitor group employed in private industry were interviewed by means of a private internet-based questionnaire. Thanks to Gen Kanai at Mozilla Japan for prompting me to publish it!

Demographics

Of the 330 in the sample, 82.7% were male, 13.6% in their twenties, 4.0% in their thirties, 30.9% in their forties, 7.3% in their fifties, and 1.2% in their sixties.

As an Opera user myself, I am not overly impressed by Internet Explorer 7, and never use it except for the corporate internet (which actually doesn’t yet officially support version 7, and in fact I’m not supposed to have upgraded, but that’s another story!) and Windows Update.

It’s difficult to know how to interpret the degree of satisfaction in Q1SQ2. Are people comparing it with the previous version and just rating the new features, or are they considering the whole package?
Read the rest of this entry »

japan.internet.com recently reported on a survey conducted on the 21st of February by JR Tokai Express Research into Apple’s new iPhone mobile phone.

Demographics

330 people from their monitor group employed in public and private enterprises completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 79.4% were male, 17.3% in their twenties, 45.8% in their thirties, 29.4% in their forties, 6.7% in their fifties, and 0.9% in their sixties.

Note that most of the features in the iPhone are already available in other phones, and even the Maps feature mentioned in Q2 is surpassed by existing applications like NaviTime (US version). There is also the question of how the touch-screen would work with Japanese input – would they just emulate the existing keypad entry, or have they a novel idea for that?
Read the rest of this entry »

DIMSDRIVE Research recently released the results of their research into the subject of Social Networking Services (SNS). Between the 24th of January and the first of February 4,489 members of their internet monitor group successfully completed a private internet-based questionnaire.

Demographics

55.5% of the sample was female, 1.0% were in their teens, 16.7% in their twenties, 37.5% in their thirties, 28.8% in their forties, 11.6% in their fifties, and 4.4% aged sixty or older. Note that were just 11 boys and 32 girls in the teenage group, so I will not mention them in the main text as the groups are too small to draw any statistical conclusions from. There were also just 46 women over sixty, also just slightly too small.

Last time I translated a survey on mixi I did ask, and then received, an invitation, but I must report that it has sat in my inbox gathering dust ever since then. This blog occasionally gets linked from within mixi, so I’m curious to find out who is doing it, but I don’t know if I really have the time to dive head-first into the site. Perhaps I’ll just be one of the 15.9% in Q3 who barely log in at all?
Read the rest of this entry »

japan.internet.com recently published the results of a survey conducted by goo Research into
awareness and use of Second Life. Over three days in the middle of February 1,073 people from goo Research’s online monitor group successfully completed a private internet-based questionnaire. Demographically, 51.5% were male, 13.0% in their teens, 23.1% in their twenties, 21.6% in their thirties, 21.4% in their forties, and 20.8% in their fifties. Note that at the time of the survey there is no Japanese language version of Second Life, and I am unsure as to even how well it supports Japanese language, but the launch of a fully localised version is not far off at all, it seems.

I get most of my information regarding Second Life from first The Register (possibly NSFW material) and second Something Awful (definitely NSFW!), so my view of it is, shall we say, rather skewed. I have no intention of taking part myself, as I’ve never been much for socialising in my First Life, let alone the Second. Quite frankly it all sounds too scary!

Coincidentaly, I also got my very first Japanese Second Life spam last night advertising the chance to meet some bored housewives for virtual rumpy-pumpy in a virtual manshon. The advertisement featured photographs of real-life women and a real-life block of flats, which seemed rather much like it was designed to entice you into the real world via the virtual.
Read the rest of this entry »

CNET Japan recently published the results of a survey conducted by a new-to-me research company, Media Interactive, regarding the video sharing site “YouTube”. The complete survey is not available, so this report may appear to be incomplete in parts. My apologies in advance. Recently the issue of respecting copyright on YouTube in Japan has become quite a major topic.

Over the first two days of February they interviewed 2,186 members of their internet monitor group (sign up here for iResearch and perhaps win a Wii, iPod, DS, etc) over the age of 18 by means of a private internet-based questionnaire. No demographic information is available, however.
Read the rest of this entry »

japan.internet.com published the results of a survey conducted by goo Research into what brands people associate with internet services. Over three days at the start of February 1,083 people from their monitor group successfully completed a private online questionnaire. The male-female split was half-and-half to three significant digits; there was one more male than female respondent. 13.5% were in their teens, 11.5% in their twenties, 14.9% in their thirties, 18.2% in their forties, 20.0% in their fifties, and 22.0% in their sixties.

On a statistical note, recently goo Research’s samples seem to be more balanced both sex and age-wise; they used to be around 55:45 male to female and biased towards the thirties age group, but this is the second time recently I’ve noticed a more balanced age spread.

I reported on a similar survey conducted this time last year, so it may be instructive to cross-reference. Google has surpassed Yahoo! for search; this trend is also visible, but not so strongly, in actual search engine use. Regarding shopping, Rakuten Marketplace retains their huge lead over Amazon, perhaps due in part to their bordering-on-spam use (abuse!) that they make of your mail address, one reason I will never shop there. They do not have a one-click unsubscribe option, and they freely share your mail address between all the shops there. Even if you just use the Y-Not! free email greeting card service that they bought out last year, they automatically subscribe you to their system and pass the address on to their shops. You have been warned!
Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, japan.internet.com reported on a survey performed by JR Tokai Express Research looking at what people were drinking when they were on the net. 46.1% of the respondents were female, 23.9% in their twenties, 41.2% in their thirties, 26.7% in their forties, 4.8% in their fifties, and 3.3% in their sixties.

In Q1, in the “Other” category, two people admitted to boozing at work… I drink black tea and mineral water at work, and filtered tap water at home.

I’ve had an idea for ages that a wonderful device for home PCs would be a “surf-a-lizer”, basically a breathaliser for your PC. You set it up (when sober, of course) to require you to breath into the bag before opening certain programs or accessing certain sites, stopping you sending embarrassing emails, mad online shopping sprees, or logging onto an online game only to get your character savaged by monsters in an attack of beer-fuddled bravado.
Read the rest of this entry »

japan.internet.com reported on goo Research’s 13th monthly RSS usage survey. Over four days at the end of January and start of February they interviewed 1,078 members of their internet monitor group. The demographics were 52.9% male, 15.7% in their teens, 19.8% in their twenties, 18.2% in their thirties, 17.4% in their forties, 16.8% in their fifties, and 11.2% in their sixties.

Although the number of people who have used RSS readers has increased slightly since the last survey, the actual numbers of active users has actually decreased by about 1.6 percentage points. The reasons for this change are not discussed within the presented results, although this could just be an insignificant statistical fluctuation.

As for visiting sites that are in my reader, as most of them are blogs I do tend to often visit, as I may want to follow the comments. I do in fact subscribe to the comment RSS feeds of my most favourite site, but will always click through when I see an interesting comment just so I can see it in context.
Read the rest of this entry »