世論 What Japan Thinks

Do you fancy damning my web site (or even your own) with faint praise? Visit Alexa’s custom t-shirt shop, and buy a shirt that proclaims just how popular my web site is. Note that I make no money on the deal, not that I expect anyone would want to buy one anyway!

Please let me know if you notice anything funny – I see last month’s top 10 has disappeared from the left-hand side, but not the right.

It was remarkably painless, but I have a funny feeling something serious must be wrong…

Looking around at a number of other sites, I see that they often offer a newsletter service. Although they (and this blog too, of course) offer RSS-based subscriptions, a newsletter seems like a good way to talk more directly to my readers. What I propose to offer is first a headline service for last week’s posts, of course, but in addition I’ll also post links to other news that has caught my eye, not just Japan public opinion-related news, but also other Japan news and even the occassional international opinion poll or other news items. I will also mention site-related news and general blog-related information that may be of interest to others, and perhaps even provide sneak previews of forthcoming cunning plans.

The mailing list will be read-only and fully moderated by myself, so it should be spam-free. I’ll keep the frequency at once a week. Please feel free to view or sign up by visiting http://groups.google.com/group/what-japan-thinks-newsletter. It’s hosted at Google, so to get the most out of it you need an account with them, but the archives are in public view and available for anyone to read. Note that I can view the email addresses of the subscribers, but no regular members can, but I promise not to sell or otherwise abuse the address list.

Alternatively, just enter your email address here to subscribe:

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I made two posts this weekend but all three seem to have disappeared!

Here we go again with them – if you saw them then saw them disappear later, please let me know! Hopefully this time they stick…

I must apologise for the terrible performance of my web site this week; I’ve had trouble posting stories, so no doubt a lot of you have also had issues connecting, as the noticable drop in my visitor count seems to suggest. Unfortunately it seems to be a hopefully passing problem with my provider, so please bear with me whilst they fix the issues.

This is also a good opportunity for me to remind you that you can get all the latest postings through my RSS feed, and also keep up to date with the comments, avoiding most of the problems surrounding site slowness.

You may also have noticed on the right-hand column that I’ve added a new advertising block for Text Link Ads, which hopefully will add some small advertising text links. If you’re interested in their service from the advertiser side, note that you can also get a bonus $100 in FREE links by spending $25 on advertising. Note that both the links are affiliate links – I get $25 if you sign up. Although currently there is no advertisement category for Japan (as far as I can see) on their web site, if a few of my fellow Japan bloggers sign up, perhaps we can get Japan added as a top-level category.

Finally, to tie the two subjects together, I’ve noticed that a few sites now have small text ads in their RSS feeds. What are your views on them? Would you mind them in my feed? Of the ones I’ve seen, I don’t find them offensive but I do find them not terribly worthwhile.

A few weeks ago you might remember that I translated a survey on the DS versus the PSP. This was picked up by Michael Mace over at Mobile Opportunity and written up as a detailed analysis in Mobile gaming in Japan: A different world. I enjoyed reading that entry, so I hope you do too.

I also noticed that Shari at My So-Called Japanese Life wrote a nice piece on what she gets out of this site.

My home internet connection decided to go on the blink yesterday, and I can only access the outside world by standing on top of the bed in the spare room with my portable PC perched on top of a rattan screen, leeching my next door neighbour’s wireless visiting an internet cafe.

Normal service should be resumed tomorrow.

I see the 2007 Bloggies are open for nominations. I could ask for a nomination in the Asian Weblog category, but I know that I’m not the best (although last year’s winner was perhaps not the best), but I think I would rather get noticed in the best topical or best-kept-secret (is that best-kept secret or best kept secret?) categories. If you could drop my blog’s name into any of these categories I’d be more than grateful!

Second, with all the survey companies being on holiday, and of course with me being on holiday too, the quality’s been a bit lower than usual. My apologies for that, but I’ve got a nice topical survey in the pipeline, and hopefully next week will see a flood of new market research for me to translate.

Third, even if that happens, I’m in cram mode for the Kanji Kentei next month, so perhaps I might have slightly less time than usual to translate, so if I drop to a frequency of once every two days, you know why!

Instead of the usual message of greetings or look back at the year, instead I’ve prepared a wee Flash greetings card for you all.

あけましておめでとうございます！

It’s a wee while since I’ve done a news round-up, so here goes.

First, there’s a rather new site, Trans-Pacific Radio, that does mostly politics-related stories on Japan and East Asia, often covering the news that other services either don’t translate or just scratch the surface of. They’ve got both a blog and regular podcasts (or netcasts, if you prefer), which I must admit I’ve not listened to yet, so please pay them a visit.

Talking of netcasts, now my new phone has a built-in audio player, what I’d really love to find is an RSS feed to SD Audio converter utility, so I could automatically add the casts to my mini SD card for listening to on the way to work. Anyone know of such a beast? Also, does anyone recommend a good tool to downsample video to mobile phone size, or to strip off the audio track?

Talking of mobile phones, I managed to view this blog, including the graphs all nicely scaled down, on my Panasonic P702iD, but when I tried adding a comment, Spam Karma crashed (the only problem I’ve ever had with this essential comment spam elimination tool for all bloggers) when trying to do the Captcha. The comment was safely quarantined, however, and could have been recovered if necessary.

Finally, I think I’ve got a touch of the flu coming on, so if I miss a couple of days over the weekend, you know what’s wrong with me.