世論 What Japan Thinks

goo Ranking recently published the results of a ranking opinion poll into what Disney (including Pixar) animation they can enjoy as an adult, for both male and female. As usual for goo Ranking, just the relative votes for each title is listed.

The two big surprises for me are that the Jungle Book is nowhere in the rankings and that Pixar’s films are rather low in the charts. Perhaps Pixar has too many Western references in its cartoons, or perhaps it loses a lot of the subtelties in translation?
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Last month japan.internet.com reported on an opinion poll conducted by goo Research into mobile phones and promotional sites. 1,049 members of goo Research’s monitor pool responded to a private internet-based questionnaire. 58.5% of the sample was female, 1.7% in their teens, 24.4% in their twenties, 41.0% in their thirties, 25.0% in their forties, and 7.9% in their fifties.
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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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At the end of last month japan.internet.com reported on a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into Windows Vista. They interviewed by means of a private internet-based survey 330 people from their monitor panel employed in public or private enterprises; 81.8% of the group was male, 12.7% in their twenties, 39.4% in their thirties, 35.2% in their forties, 11.8% in their fifties, and 0.9% in their sixties.

I’ve used a couple of the early developer releases of Vista, and quite frankly I was seriously unimpressed. One key reason was the overload in warnings every time you tried to do anything that affected system settings which served no useful purpose other than to train the user to aim for the OK button regardless of the details of any warning displayed. I don’t know how the final version has got round this problem. The other reason was that we couldn’t get a decent graphics card and display driver configured, so the front end was exceptionally slow. In addition, due to the beta nature, I suppose, Visual Studio 2005 crashed frequently and randomly. I’ll definitely be staying clear until at least the first service pack appears!
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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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At the start of November MyVoice surveyed its community to find out what they thought about DecoMail. 8,806 people completed the survey; 54% were female, 2% in their teens, 21% in their twenties, 39% in their thirties, 25% in their forties, and 13% in their fifties.

DecoMail is basically HTML email for mobile phones, allowing you to embed photos, graphics and simple HTML font and colour changes, etc into your message. Almost all of the new generation (DoCoMo’s FOMA, Softbank’s 3G and au’s WIN) of mobile phones support the creation of it, and older phones can display it as it gets converted into a web link at some stage in the delivery process. It can also be sent to (and received from?) external mail servers, although the exact process is as yet unclear. As indicated by this poll, it has got a wee bit of a following, and in fact my wife has recently been getting DecoMail from her friends (and from me too) even though her older phone doesn’t support displaying it inline.

I’ve now just sent my account here a test message (resize your broswer to VGA, please…), which arrived as a multi-part MIME message with the first part plain text (with special DoCoMo characters stripped), the second the HTML version, and the remaining parts the inline graphics. That design is a pre-installed template, already complete with the scrolling text (which goes a long way towards getting it its spam rating), awful colours, and all the other hideousnesses! Some of the other templates are even worse…
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As we get towards the end of the year, everyone is coming out with rankings. This time it’s Mitsui Sumitomo Bank’s consulting group presenting their picks in the form of sumo ranking, and since Mari has already translated the story over in her diary, please pay her a visit through the link above!

Perhaps at the end of the season I should do a summary league table of the biggest big things according to all the various sources. I’ve also noticed that the magazine ダカーポ, Da Capo, this week has a cover story about the top people, things, booms and incidents of the year. I should invest the 320 yen in order to bring you all some more interesting material.

With most train lines stopping around 12 midnight and not resuming until 5 am, there is always the danger of getting one over the eight and missing the last train. So, with this in mind, goo Ranking published the results of a survey conducted towards the end of October into what people did if they had to wait for the first train home. As usual for goo Rankings, there is no demographic information, and scores are the percentages of the top ranking choice.

Note that getting a taxi home is usually an infeasible option as taxis are horrendously expensive once you get past a few kilometres. Also note that family resturants tend to have all-you-can-drink soft drink options, so it is easy to hole up all night nursing a bottomless cup of coffee. The times I’ve missed (sometimes on purpose!) the last train home I’ve ended up in a karaoke box or even walking home, even though it was a good ten kilometres or so!
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DIMSDRIVE Research recently released the results of a poll into the use of commercial odour reduction or elimination chemicals. They interviewed 5,453 members of their monitor pool in the middle of October by means of a private internet-based opinion poll. 56.9% of the sample was female, 67.0% married, and 53.4% of the whole sample had children. 13.8% lived alone, 24.2% with one other person, 48.4% with two or three others, and 13.6% with four or more people. The age profile was 0.9% in their teens, 14.5% in their twenties, 33.5% in their thirties, 30.8% in their forties, 15.0% in their fifties, and 5.3% aged sixty or older.

With only 7.0% of people noticing that their house smells, this compares favourably with those who don’t worry about their own smell. I’m surprised at cooking smells being so low, as it tends to be what I notice most often in other people’s houses, but perhaps it is just down to my unfamiliarity with Japanese cooking smells, especially as we run an almost vegetarian kitchen with very little deep frying or grilling.
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On the first of December Japan’s biggest correspondence course company, U-CAN, and Jiyu Kokumin Sha (a book publishing company) released the results of a survey into the top words or expressions to come into vogue this year. The voting was conducted, I believe, by means of a public web poll though both of their web sites, but no demographic information is available. On the web site linked above you can find all sixty candidate words that the winners were selected from.

The handkerchief prince meme became one of the most irritating ones for me; it seemed that almost ever comedian picked up on it, and the merest dab of their foreheads with a blue hanky was enough to send the studio audience into paroxisms of mirth.

Regarding Metabolic Syndrome or middle-age spread, and to stray rather far away from the topic, I had an intersting discussion at work this afternoon regarding the best way to tackle this issue. This year’s winter bonus seems to have been spent in one of two ways; first, on the Panasonic Joba, a decidedly non-bucking bronco for your living room. One colleague recounted a story how one of the old guys in her English class is a cowboy freak, so at home indulges in cosplay by dressing up in a cowboy outfit, saddling up and watching John Wayne movies. As a result, his English is rather advanced but contains many expressions that died in the Wild West. Second, the Wii. Quite a lot of people old enough to know better queued overnight for the release and spent the weekend working out to Wii Sports.
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