世論 What Japan Thinks

japan.internet.com, in conjunction with goo Research, looked at the use of video sharing sites. 1,011 internet users from all over the country completed an online questionnaire; 57.5% of the sample were female, 24.2% in their twenties, 43.9% in their thirties, 23.0% in their forties, and 8.9% in their fifties.

YouTube is apparently a current hot topic of discussion, with over 2 million Japanese visitors reported. My main concern regarding these places is the copyright isssues, as there are many blatant rips of Japanese TV being uploaded, which is illegal regardless of any added value the uploader has attached, for example Lazer Ramon HG’s subtitled adventures!
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At the end of April, japan.internet.com, in conjunction with goo Research, looked into the usage of Social Bookmarking Services. They interviewed 1,069 people by means of an internet-based questionnaire. 43.2% of the sample was male, and the age breakdown was 2.6% in their teens, 21.6% in their twenties, 43.1% in their thirties, 24.4% in their forties, and 8.2% in their fifties.

I’ve used del.icio.us myself, but more as an attempted tool of promotion than as some sort of social affair. I get a very small amount of traffic (and in just one or two hits a day) from there and other services like furl and Technorati, although I do have a plan underway to get my own local tagging service up and running, perhaps this weekend.

Note that comparing figures with a survey last month on the state of RSS reader usage, although nearly four times as many people use RSS readers compared to social bookmarking services, round about a third of those interviewed in both surveys expressed a wish to use them in the future.
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At the end of April, japan.internet.com, in conjuction with goo Research, published the results of a survey into how much people trust various internet sources. This survey comes hot on the heels of an astonishing (to me) poll that discovered well over 90% of Wikipedia users trusted the contents to some degree. Here they interviewed 1,012 members of the goo Research monitor group via a private internet poll. The demographics were 57.6% female, 3.3% were teenagers, 24.7% were in their twenties, 40.4% were in their thirties, 24.0% in their forties, and 7.6% in their fifties.

I am suprised at just two in five saying that they have encountered false data on the internet! I also find it surprising that a relatively high number trust shopping sites over Q&A sites; my gut reaction would be the other way round, especially as the Q&A sites that I am aware of seem to have an active community that corrects any errors before they get propagated. In addition, considering the popularity of auction sites, under 5% trusting them seems to run counter to expectations.
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japan.internet.com, in conjuction with goo Research, recently investigated the use of Social Networking Services, or SNS, in Japan. 1,087 members of the goo Research Monitors took part in the internet-based survey. 56.3% of the sample was female; 2.4% were in their teens, 22.9% in their twenties, 39.9% in their thirties, 24.8% in their forties, and 10.0% in their fifties. It may be instructive to compare the results here with those from an earlier survey of SNS that I translated in December.

総務省, soumushou, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, recently released figures that stated there were 7.16 million registered users of SNS (I’m not sure if people registered for two services are counted twice) at the end of March 2006; in the six months from September of 2005 the number of has increased by almost 80%! As well as users increasing, so are the services; in February Yahoo! opened up the beta version of Yahoo 360° and in March Rakuten introduced Rakuten Plaza Links.
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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, in conjunction with goo Research, recently carried out their eighth regular survey on internet tool usage. They interviewed by means of an internet-based questionnaire 1,071 (the text says 1,071, but later calculations suggest that the sample size is actually 1,037; 1,071 seems to have been the sample size for the previous survey!) people from all over Japan towards the end of March. The sample consisted of 56.0% female, and the age breakdown was 2.7% in their teens, 23.8% in their twenties, 39.3% in their thirties, 22.6% in their forties, 9.2% in their fifties, and 2.3% sixty or older.

I have previously translated their fifth survey on tools, and in these four months the percentage of RSS reader users has climbed just 1.5 percentage points, or an increase of around 10% in four months. Although this seems like a significant relative increase, looking at the reasons why people do not use them the top answer was that people see little need for them. I also saw little need to begin with, but once I started using one I wondered why I hadn’t begun earlier. I subscribe mostly to blogs that update once every day or so; higher-frequency news sites give too much information, I feel, and using filtering might cause me to miss stuff, so I just use bookmarks for my news requirements.
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japan.internet.com, in conjunction with Cross Marketing, conducted an internet-based survey amongst 300 internet users, 50.3% female, to see what internet habits they had. 16.7% of the sample was aged 18 or 19, and 16.6% were from each of the other decades of life from the twenties to the sixties. I’m not sure how exactly work computers are suppposed to figure in this survey.

I think the results on SNS usage are particularly interesting – I’ve felt to some degree that SNSs are basically a more private form of blogging, so I’d love to see a more detailed survey on why people participate in SNS, or write blogs for that matter!

Personally, on the whole I switch on my home PC in the late evening (say past 9pm or so), and with this blog requiring rather a lot of work, I have little time for other activities bar mail.
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japan.internet.com, in conjuction with goo Research, carried out an online poll amongst the goo Research Monitors to find out what they thought about Wikipedia. They surveyed 1,060 people, 55.6% female, over a few days at the start of April. The age demographics were 24.6% in their twenties, 43.7% in their thirties, 23.7% in their forties, and 8.0% in their fifties.

I personally only trust Wikipedia to a small degree; to be honest, I can only fully trust articles I know myself to be correct, I trust items on non-controversial subjects to a lesser degree, so I suppose that makes me one of those who doesn’t really trust it. I edited the Takarazuka Theatre article, for instance, but I have seen some of my information removed, and now the article is descending into trivia, bad writing, and inconsistent information – I can see at least two mistakes in a quick scan. Controversial subjects are the least trustworthy, as the alleged “neutral point of view” ends up as being given to either the side who shouted first or loudest, or has the most friends in high places. As with a lot of Open Source, everyone wants to stamp their mark, but few want to just fix other’s stuff, and even if they do, they often unwittingly trample on the ego of those who want their information preserved.

A good example of the above is Japanese Name. This needs a complete rewrite, as the same information is repeated twice or even thrice, there is trivia galore, showing off (some valid, some invalid), falsehoods and slack wording.
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japan.internet.com, in conjunction with Cross Marketing, conducted an internet-based survey amongst 300 internet users, 50.3% female, to see what internet habits they had. 16.7% of the sample was aged 18 or 19, and 16.6% were from each of the other decades of life from the twenties to the sixties. I’m not sure how exactly work computers are suppposed to figure in this survey.

I think the results on SNS usage are particularly interesting – I’ve felt to some degree that SNSs are basically a more private form of blogging, so I’d love to see a more detailed survey on why people participate in SNS, or write blogs for that matter!

Personally, on the whole I switch on my home PC in the late evening (say past 9pm or so), and with this blog requiring rather a lot of work, I have little time for other activities bar mail.
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