世論 What Japan Thinks

japan.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]“.
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japan.internet.com recently reported on a survey conducted by Cross Marketing Inc in the middle of November into the use of web sites from mobile phones. 300 mobile phone owners, 50.0% male and 50.0% female, with 20.0% in their teens, and 20.0% in their twenties, thirties, forties and fifties completed the private internet-based survey.
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japan.internet.com released the results of an opinion poll conducted this month by goo Research into searching for your own name and others on the internet. 1,088 people successfully completed the internet-based private questionnaire. 56.3% of the sample was male, 21.8% in their twenties, 41.5% in their thirties, 25.2% in their forties, and 11.5% in their fifties.

This practice is known as egosurfing and is fun from not just the ego point of view, but also for finding others of the same name – my non-double-barreled name is shared with a commentator for the Jets (what Jets, or what sport, I don’t know), a member of the Manitoba Hockey Players Foundation, president for Veridiem Inc, a member of Consumer Direct Scotland, and someone mapping Hong Kong’s cultural landscapes. Interestingly enough, my wife’s name turns up zero Japanese hits and just one false English hit.
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of an opinion poll conducted by goo Research towards the end of November into sponsored blogging. 1,093 people from their internet monitor group successfully completed a private internet-based poll. 57.0% of the sample was female, 2.1% in their teens, 20.4% in their twenties, 42.4% in their thirties, 24.9% in their forties, and 10.2% in their fifties.

This practice is often disparagingly called “astroturfing”, meaning faking grass roots support. When it is disguised support, I hate it too, but when made clear I don’t really mind it; to illustrate using my current AdWords advertisers, the subtle and distrusted astroturfing would be something like:

By the way, recently I’ve been dabbling in hedge funds, and found the info at HedgeSynergy invaluable…

The obvious format, which Japundit do really well (now, did they pay me to say that?), is:

You may wish to visit my sponsor at Hayden-Harnett, which seems to be selling rather nice accessories and the like.

My personal least favourite is the habit of using (disclosure: I have a relationship with the company) which to me always reads as (disclosure: they pay me to say this).

There’s also a company PayPerPost which, as the name perhaps suggests, pays you to post about a product or service; actually, they are more of an introduction service, introducing advertisers with advertisees. I’ve not used them though, and I don’t think that sort of blogging would fit in well with this web site.
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japan.internet.com recently reported on goo Research’s 12th regular monthly survey into RSS issues. 1,062 people from their monitor group, 51.6% female, completed the private internet-based poll. 1.7% of the sample was in thier teens, 20.6% in their twenties, 40.8% in their thirties, 23.1% in their forties, 10.2% in their fifties, and 3.7% aged sixty or older.

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of RSS, the BBC has a simple introduction to what it is and why you may want to use it. I know from looking at my own statistics, I probably have as many, if not more, readers through my RSS feed than by bookmark referers and possibly even visitors through links from other sites, although both are beaten by people coming in through search engines.

One big selling point for RSS and web-based services like Bloglines is that I can keep perfectly up to date across multiple machines.
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infoPLANT recently performed a survey into the consumption of news. Over a week at the end of October 5,973 people, 62.1% female, chose to complete the public survey available through iMode.

Although infoPLANT used its usual method of collecting self-selecting respondents through NTT DoCoMo’s iMode mobile phone menu system, thus resulting in a bias towards those who are heavy users of mobile phone, the data forms an interesting point of comparision to a recent translation of a more balanced survey of the news consumption habits of the average person. We cqan immediately see from the pie charts that there are a quarter less daily paper reader amongst the mobile phoners, but even though there are presumably a lot of heavy users in this sample, newspapers still outdo all internet-based web services put together.

The survey also looks at iChannel, a new non-free but low cost service from DoCoMo that pushes headlines to mobile phones. I tried out a free preview of it but it seemed rather ordinary, and being a stingey git, paying a couple of hundred yen per month was just a bit too much for me!
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goo Ranking recently published the results of the top 100 search keywords used through their search engine for the first 10 months of this year from January 1st to October 31st. The top word, either individually or extracted from multi-word searches, got 100 points, and the rest of the words got a percentage rating for their frequency. I presume that the adult keywords have been filtered out.

There’s perhaps some interesting analysis that can be done of this data, but I’ll leave that for someone else to tackle! Links have been added to some of the search terms.
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of an opinion poll conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into the subject of online stocks and shares trading. They interviewed 330 people employed in public or private enterprises; 82.4% of the sample was male, 10.9% in their twenties, 49.1% in their thirties, 32.7% in their forties, 6.7% in their fifties, and 0.6% in their sixties.

I know there’s a few people in my office who do online trading, but I don’t know what sort of portfolio they have outside of the company’s own employee share system, or how active they are. I used to have a few shares from privatisations back home, and come to think of it, I might even have some hiding somewhere that I’ve lost touch with. Didn’t Standard Life go private recently and give away many free shares to the policy holders?
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japan.internet.com recently published extracted highlights from goo Research’s 28th regular blogging survey. This time, one of the reported statistics was on why people quit. At the start of November 1,041 members of goo Research’s monitor pool replied to the online questionnaire. 53.5% of the sample was female, 2.3% in their teens, 24.0% in their twenties, 38.7% in their thirties, 21.7% in their forties, 10.1% in their fifties, and 3.2% aged sixty or older.

I felt the answers to the quitting reason were a bit difficult to interpret (from a logical point of view, not from a translation one!), especially the top reason, given by over two-thirds, of updating being just too much of a pain – 「更新が面倒になったから」, “henshin ga mendouni nattakara”. I’ve not used the Japanese blogging services so I don’t know how user-friendly they are, but was it formatting the content that was awkward, or maintaining the design, pruning spam, replying to comments, or other housekeeping tasks?

For me personally, I’ve thought about quitting for time reasons and a lack of search engine positioning; I don’t try any particular SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) techniques, but with nearly 500 distinct articles in Google and friends, I get a disappointingly low number of visits – I just recently got through 200 per day excluding one dodgy pr0n keyword that gives me just a bit too much traffic.
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A little while back goo Ranking published the results of a poll into the top 30 new internet words. Many of these neologisms are unlikely to ever find their way into a dictionary, other than perhaps one of the Wiki family, of course. As usual for goo Ranking, the top vote gets 100 points, and all the rest get a value representing the percentage of votes relative to the number one choice.

As you might suspect, many of these words were coined on 2 Channel.

As I no doubt have made many, many mistakes, please feel free to correct me!
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