世論 What Japan Thinks

With both Google and Bing getting into social search by highlighting pages that have been shared or otherwise flagged by friends, goo Research decided to look at that subject, in a report published by japan.internet.com.

Demographics

Between the 28th of June and the 3rd of July 2011 1,082 members of the goo Research monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.1% of the sample were male, 16.2% in their teens, 18.2% in their twenties, 21.5% in their thirties, 16.5% in their forties, 15.5% in their fifties, and 12.1 aged sixty or older.

If you’d like to see more of what I like in social search, and if you use Google, I just discovered today that I have had an invite for Google+. If you too are in, my profile is here. Perhaps I should add Google+ to my sidebar along with Facebook.
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An interesting ranking survey by goo Ranking looked at why people come to want to stop following someone on Twitter.

Demographics

Between the 20th and 22nd of April 2011 1,110 members of the goo Research monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 60.5% of the sample were female, 10.8% in their teens, 16.2% in their twenties, 27.4% in their thirties, 26.4% in their forties, 9.3% in their fifties, and 9.9% aged sixty or older. Note that the score in the results refers to the relative number of votes for each option, not a percentage of the total sample.

I only follow people I know, and don’t really read Twitter anyway, so none of the below in any way relate to what I do!

Next week I hope to have the opposite survey for you, why people want to follow someone.
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Have you ever bought goods or services through search ads?The latest mini report from japan.internet.com on a goo Research survey was this one on the 15th regular look at internet advertising.

Demographics

Between the 21st and 24th of June 2011 1,083 members of the goo Research monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.7% of the sample were male, 16.3% in their teens, 18.0% in their twenties, 21.3% in their thirties, 16.3% in their forties, and 28.0% aged fifty or older.

Despite having contextual adverts myself, at these points I always do recommend people run an advertisement blocker. My favourite is AdMuncher (affiliate link); it comes with a 30 day free trial so you can see how it works. I love it for the simplicity and that it works with every browsers, so block a URL once and it disappears from everywhere.
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A recent survey from goo Research looked at internet telephony, or VoIP, and the report on japan.internet.com focused on a pair of questions about Skype.

Demographics

Between the 13th and 16th of June 2011 1,091 members of the goo Research monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.7% of the sample were male, 16.2% in their teens, 18.2% in their twenties, 21.4% in their thirties, 16.4% in their forties, 15.4% in their fifties, and 12.4% aged sixty or older.

I’m surprised with the high percentage using Skype on their smartphones; I wonder what the pattern of usage is? Do people leave it always loaded as a replacement for the phone, or do they just load it up for specific calls, or do they send an email to tell the other end to load up the program? Perhaps one day I’ll find a report on that…
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This recent survey from goo Research, reported on by japan.internet.com, into online automatic translation services found Google on top in both usage and satisfaction, a quite amazing change from just a year ago when Google was nowhere to be seen.

Demographics

Between the 8th and 12th of June 2011 1,082 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.0% of the sample were male, 16.5% in their teens, 18.0% in their twenties, 21.3% in their thirties, 16.4% in their forties, 15.8% in their fifties, and 12.1% aged sixty or older.

I must agree that Google does produce the best results, but Japanese to English is always a tricky task due in no small part to subjects or objects often being dropped from sentences, the present and future tenses being identical, singular versus plural often not distinguished, etc, etc. As Google Translate says japan.internet.com (or is that comb the Internet?) summed up:

Not rely on automated translation is fairly but not all, at least you go up enough to understand the accuracy of the translation summary, Soredake, would do less well in the language barrier.
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With news of LulzSec and other hackers making off with passwords, and other attacks based around people’s GMail accounts, this recent survey from goo Research, reported on by japan.internet.com, into email passwords is rather timely. Note that I have previously translated an older survey into passwords.

Demographics

Over the 31st of May and the 1st of June 2011 1,077 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.7% of the sample were male, 17.0% in their teens, 17.7% in their twenties, 21.4% in their thirties, 16.1% in their forties, 16.1% in their fifties, and 11.8% aged sixty or older.

I have absolutely no idea what my email passwords are! My Gmail ones are 20 characters long and randomly generated and managed by KeePass (fiddly to get the hang of, but this is a good tutorial) and my ISP one is the one they supplied, a 10 character mixed case alphanumeric one. My wife, without any training from me, keeps her in text files and uses a different one for each site, at least 8 characters long and a mix of usually names and semi-random numbers. Not the best of security, but at least she varies on every site, which in practise might actually provide more overall security than one big long one used everywhere.
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This short report from japan.internet.com on a survey from goo Research on SNS (Social Network Service) privacy produced some interesting results that seem to run counter to the popular image of Japanese SNS users.

Demographics

Between the 16th and 19th of May 2011 1,082 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.2% of the sample were male, 16.4% in their teens, 18.8% in their twenties, 21.5% in their thirties, 15.8% in their forties, 15.3% in their fifties, and 12.2% aged sixty or older.

Note that in this survey, Twitter counts as an SNS, although I’ve never really understood why. Also note that the public viewing described below might be limited to only friends.
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iShare’s latest look at issues surrounding the earthquake on March 11th was at usage of web services in times of emergency.

Demographics

On the 15th of April 2011 1,193 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 42.3% of the sample were male, 8.9% in their twenties, 45.7% in their thirties, and 45.4% in their forties.

I confirmed my safety first via email to my parents, then by blog. Although I didn’t directly post to any social web service, my blog posts automatically end up on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn so I suppose technically I did use such a web service as asked by Q1 and Q1SQ.

The last time there was a disaster was the derailment of the JR train at Amagasaki, on the line I used then, but that time my parents confirmed my safety via a post I made that got published on the BBC news web site.
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Unfortunately, the reports on japan.internet.com of surveys from goo Research recently took a turn for the worse with only one, not three, data sets being reported in detail. However, I will keep using them, but there will be more text and less tables. The first of these abbreviated surveys is on Twitter, with the focus being on getting information with, I suspect, the recent Great East Japan Earthquake Disaster being prominent in people’s minds when answering.

Demographics

Betweem the 12th and 18th of April 2011 1,082 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.2% of the sample were male, 16.5% in their teens, 18.5% in their twenties, 21.6% in their thirties. 15.9% in their forties, 15.2% in their fifties, and 12.2% aged sixty or older.

I didn’t use Twitter to get any information, but I’m glad that not too many people seemed to have found information such as that from the French embassy useful.
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With the earthquake having knocked out a lot of power generation in the Tokyo area, one of the methods being mooted for saving electricity is to increase telecommuting, the topic of a recent survey by iShare.

Demographics

Between the 8th and 11th of April 2011 670 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 60.6% of the sample were male, 2.4% were in their twenties, 46.7% in their thirties, and 50.9% in their forties. All of the sample were employed and worked outside the home.

At work we have a telecommute environment complete with a quite frankly horrendous email client and a remote meeting application that I’ve never used. However, this environment can only be accessed via work notebook computers, but even though we have a draconian set of information security rules I think almost everyone else in the office works around them; I try to avoid working at home, so put no effort into making an easier environment for myself.

Regarding telecommuting and saving power – my employer too will be promoting it this summer, despite being outside the affected areas, and of course everyone in the office noticed that the additional load from a home air conditioner is more than that saved by one less body in the office and one less body in the trains. We’re forbidden from working in a coffee shop, so we can’t even borrow someone else’s cool air for work…
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