世論 What Japan Thinks

japan.internet.com recently published the results of a survey carried out over three days in early September by goo Research into the use of instant messenging (IM) software. 1,063 members of their internet monitor group successfully completed their private questionnaire; 46.9% of the sample was male, 22.7% in their twenties, 44.0% in their thirties, 22.7% in their forties, 8.4% in their fifties, and 2.3% in their sixties.

I’m both surprised and not surprised by how low the figure for usage at work is, namely less than 9%. Surprised because I get the impression from Slashdot that the vast majority of American workers use it, and in fact it seems to be actively encouraged in many big corporations. Not surprised, because my workplace has the network locked down pretty tight (in places…) so I expect the more common ports are blocked, although you can, of course, use most of the IM software through the HTTP port 80, but then the proxy might have blacklisted the servers. I’d better stop here before I (a) get all bitter and twisted about company policy, and (b) leak some confidential information through my bitterness and twistedness!
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japan.internet.com recently reported on goo Research’s 27th regular monthly survey into blogs. The reported results this time were for the basics of blogging. Over four days at the start of September they interviewed 1,074 people from their internet monitor group. Demographically, 56.0% were female, 2.6% in their teens, 21.6% in their twenties, 41.2% in their thirties, 20.6% in their forties, 10.8% in their fifties, and 3.3% aged sixty or older.

I’d love to see how these figures compare with other countries; over half the bloggers update at least once a week, with women 8 percentage points higher than men. Blogs are now almost universally known, and with over a third of the people having blogged, blogging is becoming a standard practice for internet users.

It’s also interesting to see that men prefer the passive communication of trackbacks, whilst women much prefer actively commenting on other people’s blogs.

Finally, I’d like to see them ask how many people have their own hosted solution.
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infoPLANT recently published the results of a survey they conducted into the use of mobile phone web sites. As usual for infoPLANT, they gained their respondents by means of a self-selecting public questionnaire, available for a week at the end of August through DoCoMo’s iMode mobile phone menuing system. 4,472 people, 62.1% female, successfully completed the survey.

Whenever I publish a translation of infoPLANT’s surveys I always add a disclaimer about the self-selecting nature of the survey. However, this survey gives a good picture of the habits of heavy iMode users, as I believe most of the infoPLANT respondents are, so this can be a good reference when trying to understand the other polls they have conducted.

Also, when I saw the results of the poll, I couldn’t resist the temptation to run the story with such a title!
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of a poll by goo Research into awareness about domains. 1,081 members of their internet monitor group successfully completed a private internet questionnaire at the start of September. The demographic breakdown was 55.8% female, 2.4% in their teens, 21.9% in their twenties, 39.9% in their thirties, 26.2% in their forties, 9.3% in their fifties and 2.7% in their sixties.

I find it quite frankly hard to believe; no, make that impossible to believe that over a quarter (or three in ten if you include those who used to have one) have their own paid-for (or free from AOL) top-level domain. I strongly suspect that this figure includes ISP sub-domain owners; I don’t know about in Japan, but when I was a Demon customer you got a whole sub-domain to yourself, @foobar.demon.co.uk, to do whatever you wanted with. Also included must be free mail vanity addresses; Plala lets you use domains like foobar@wonder-boy.jp, foobar@surfer-wave.com to create extra accounts. Finally, blogging services might also be mistakenly included, counting http://foobar.bloggingservice.com subdomain as a domain. Note how email counts as the most popular use of these domains, which backs up my suspicions. Also note that registering a .jp address costs 20,989 yen for two years, and a .co.jp costs 42,000 yen for two years, and requires you to be a registered company; my two years of hosting for this place, including two .com domains, costs me less than than!

I’ve never heard of the .mobi mobile phone domain until this survey, though.
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This rather buzzword-overloaded title refers to the results of a survey at the start of this month by goo Research, published by japan.internet.com, on spreading memes, or baton touching, to use the Japanese-English terminology; baton is the meme, touching is the spreading of it. 1,092 members of their monitor pool successfully completed an internet-based private poll; 56.8% of the sample was female, 2.4% in their teens, 21.9% in their twenties, 46.3% in their thirties, and 29.4% in their forties,

Here the meme is the creation and spreading of a set of questions through the blogosphere (uggh, buzzword overload!); you get tagged by someone, answer a set of questions on a theme in a post to your blog, ending by selecting five more victims to take their turn in answering, as in this, the first English example I could find through Google, or this, a Japanese blog dedicated to passing the baton. “Baton touch” is, as indicated, yet another Japanese-English phrase, just in case you are confused by it, where we would probably use “baton pass” instead in English. Apparently if you pop onto mixi and search for バトン, baton, you can find no end of them to join in with.

Note that apparently this baton passing is also being used for PR campaigns, and for CGM, Consumer Generated Media, but as to what form this takes, I am yet to learn.
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japan.internet.com today published the results of a survey by JR Tokai Express Research into podcasting. They interviewed 331 people from their monitor pool, 87.6% male, employed in private or public enterprises. 7.3% were in their twenties, 39.9% in their thirties, 36.3% in their forties, 13.9% in their fifties, and 2.7% in their sixties.

I would be in the ex-users category, myself; even though this blog has been featured on three podcasts, the latest of them being Japundit’s podcast, Japan Talk, I have to admit I’ve not listened to the last two, and I in fact ditched my Sony hard disk player recently, but Panasonic’s recent announcement of their SD800N digital audio player with noise-cancelling headphones I could perhaps be persuaded to try again.
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With the impending IPO of mixi (related here by Gen Kanai), at an initial offer price of just over a million yen, or nearly £5000, per share, it may be timely to have a look at a report on japan.internet.com of goo Research’s second regular look into Social Networking Services, or SNS. 1,090 members of their internet monitor group responded to the survey; 55.8% were female, 1.6% in their teens, 22.1% in their twenties, 39.2% in their thirties, 24.6% in their forties, 9.4% in their fifties, and 3.0% in their sixties.

Last time I published an SNS survey I asked for an invite; I did get a couple of offers, but I’ve still not had time to actually take up any of them! It would be nice to have an account just for the sake of being able to say I do have one, and also as I do get the occasional hit from mixi that I cannot view without an account…

Q1: Do you use Social Networking Services (SNS)? (Sample size=1,090)

Currently using an SNS	23.9%
Used to use SNSs but don’t any longer	5.4%
Never used one	44.0%
Don’t know what they are	26.7%

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japan.internet.com published the results of a survey by goo Research into the use of web site passwords carried out at the start of this month. 1,091 members of goo’s research monitor group successfully completed the private web-based questionnaire. 56.7% of the sample was female, and 20.3% were in their twenties, 41.5% in their thirties, 24.5% in their forties, 10.2% in their fifties, and 3.6% in their sixties.

The stunning figure is that 266 people, or 24.4%, admitted to using a password identical to their user name, if allowed by the web site. 43.4% said they wrote it down, which arguably can be better than memorising a simpler one, although no questions were asked in this survey on how complex passwords were.

This survey highlights perhaps two possible approaches to hacking in addition to the headline’s method of using the same user name and password. Another would be a phishing attack, but one that on password entry presented a password error. Since almost half the people say they repeatedly guess at the password, this type of fake site might yield multiple passwords for various sites. Finally, an attack that I have never heard of, but seems ridiculously simple for such situations as online game bulletin boards for competing clans, where, by means of a backdoor into the password routines, one can extract user names and passwords which can then be used for whatever purposes, once you track down the places that that user frequents.

Back on the subject of personal password management, I once tried using a password management tool, but it was excessively cryptic and after entering two or three passwords I forgot exactly how to go about entering a master password, and couldn’t recover from the situation, so I had to delete the tool!

I can’t find a similar survey of passwords from other countries, but if anyone can provide a link, it would make a useful comparison.
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of a survey by goo Research into podcasting. Over three days at the end of July they interviewed 1,046 members of their internet monitor group. 55.2% of the respondents were female, 23.3% were in their twenties, 39.0% in their thirties, 26.0% in their forties, and 11.7% in their fifties.

It seems to me that podcasting has been replaced by YouTube as the in-vogue buzzword. The last podcast I downloaded (no link as I wouldn’t want to subject you to it too) was a personal “audio postcard from Japan”-kind of recording, but oh dear! Never again will I go near that style of podcast – the lack of a usable fast-forward that duplicates aurally the visual scanning of headlines sapped up all my enthusiasm for the medium and the whiny gaijin content turned me right off the person.
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japan.internet.com recently reported on JR Tokai Express Research’s survey into bookmarking habits. Towards the end of July they interviewed 331 internet users from their monitor group: 67.4% were male, 13.6% in their twenties, 35.3% in their thirties, 35.0% in their forties, 12.1% in their fifties, and 3.9% in their sixties.

This is an interesting set of questions, although I would have also liked to have seen Q1 as a multiple answer question. For Q3, I’d like to say I use an RSS reader, but only low-traffic sites (up to four or five new items per day) get into my reader; any more and I feel I would rather just use my bookmarks so I can scan headlines faster and easier. Incidentally, just less than half of the Japanese survey sites I regularly scan offer an RSS feed for their updates, which is a bit of a pain.
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