世論 What Japan Thinks

Looking at my recent search referrers, I couldn’t help but notice what Google is telling me:

http://www.google.com/search?q=most popular japanese blog

Which, at the time of writing, gives me none other than this very site as the top hit!

Talking of Google hits, I had one rather obsessive Canadian trying:

http://www.google.ca/search?q=her OR with OR without OR prettier OR nearsighted “glasses”&start=680

What on earth was this person looking for?

Just a bit of site news to tell you that I’ve got the new Blogads code up and running, so space can be purchased on my blog at quite reasonable rates, starting from US$15 for 500 characters for three months. (Correct as of posting date, and all advert prices are subject to change without any notice, and all adverts subject to approval or rejection)

I believe there is someone who has bought Google AdWords to run on this site, based on the fact that I have a non-zero (but still negligible) advert CPM (per thousand page views). Purchasing Blogads will get your ad on every page of the blog for a guaranteed length of time at a fixed cost, with no extra costs for click-throughs, etc. Three months will get you around 50,000 page views (given current traffic rates, client-side ad blocking software permitting), working out at about 30 cents CPM. Direct purchasing from Blogads also helps me out as I get 70% of the fees rather than relying on the vagaries of Google to determine how much I might or might not receive.

Thank you all for your continued patronage! We now returned to our scheduled blogging.

Starting from tonight, I’m on holiday (luckily not heading back to the UK, given the recent alert) until next Sunday the 20th. During that time, I’ll probably be too busy doing nothing to update as regularly as I usually do, and you may see more short surveys and perhaps lower quality than normal, starting from the very next post. You have been warned!

This isn’t an unseasonal survey, but as you may have noticed (or not, if you’re one of my RSS or LiveJournal readers) I’ve had a redesign! After getting a recent comment from Sho:

Love your site, but I must admit I don’t like the design much. That will scare a lot of people off.

I thought I should really update it. Perhaps when I chose the old theme it reflected my mood, so now thanks to the happy pills I’ve moved away from Journalized Winter to the brighter and slightly Web two point naught-ish rounded boxes of Nearly-Sprung.

It was pretty difficult finding a nice clean three-column theme with the centre story option; there’s quite a few with two right-hand or left-hand narrow columns, and Mike Little’s other Journalized themes were still a bit grey at the edges. So, I grabbed Nearly-Sprung (it’s a pun on Almost Spring, the two-column theme that it is a reworking of) and have been hacking at it for a few days. If you notice anything out of place or otherwise looking broken, please give me a shout. I’d be especially interested in knowing if it looks strange in your browser. I feel the base font is perhaps just too small. What do my readers think?

I’ll be updating the advert colour palettes shortly, so no need to remind me about that! Also, all existing graphs have grey backgrounds, and I don’t have time to regenerate them all, but new ones should be white. My pie chart library doesn’t support transparent backgrounds, unfortunately.

Finally, when testing my theme, I found the small Preview Theme plugin from Ryan Boren rather useful.

For the benefit of those of you reading through the RSS feed (or those who are ad-blind), note that I have now placed in prime position in the top left of my blog a spot for advertising through BlogAds. I’ll spare you all the sales pitch; just click the link if you want more details. I’ll try to be fussy about what I accept – I wouldn’t want to subject you to anything I don’t think is in keeping with the main themes of this blog, but conversely I will be welcoming of topical commercial advertising.

As I know there’s a lot of WordPress bloggers out there using Optimal Title so that their blog title ends up with the story title before the blog title, because if the full title gets truncated by a search engine, the important story part is less likely to get the chop.

However, if you add into the mix Jerome’s Keywords (a plugin I heartily recommend to anyone), one problem you may soon notice is that if you don’t add a custom tag results page, the title for tag lookups like http://whatjapanthinks.com/tag/plugin ends up as merely the default blog name, which is rather poor from a search engine perspective.
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I’ve recently come across Japan Probe, an interesting blog on things Japanese that I can recommend you all pay a visit. I especially liked his translation of the top 100 favourite historical figures, which you might find surprising.

He also highlights, as does the BBC, how sleep deprevation costs Japan $30 billion per year. I don’t think that sales of these energy drinks make up for that loss! At my office, for instance, at least one person regularly falls asleep during meetings, and morning mass meetings have about 10% to 15% of the crowd nodding off in their chairs.

Next, we subscribed to Cat’s Heart, a cat care magazine which features the occassional reader survey. This month I learnt when 460 readers were surveyed, 62.6% reported their cats can open doors or drawers, etc; for vet bills, a vaccine averaged 5,222 yen amongst the 286 owners asked, and getting your kitten fixed costs 14,448 yen for boys and 21,449 yen for girls according to 190 and 180 owners.

Finally, this week Trivia no Izumi decided to look at if astrologers would tell the fortune of animals. In their usual deadpan style, they first got three identical newly-hatched chickens, gave them three different names, and took them off to get read. After the astrologer had rabbited on for a bit, the interviewer asked what happens if we rename them all to the same name. Next, three eels (I think they were eels) were borrowed from a hatchery attached to a restaurant. One reading later, all three ended up in eel pie. A tropical fish got read, then the aphid in the tank with it, which we were assured would have a long life. The fish promptly ate it. Finally, someone volunteered to read four beansprouts and went on about how one had a great future as an estate agent. The resultant statistic was that assuming their palms got crossed with sufficient silver (3,000 to 4,000 yen for 15 minutes seemed the going rate), 97 out of the 100 asked would do readings for animals.

I’ve decided to go all Web two point zero and added a tag cloud thingie. Thanks to Jerome’s Keywords Plugin for the support.

It’s currently a bit unwieldy, I think, but I plan to make a usable index out of the thing somehow… Please report any oddities you might find to me.

I’ve installed Spam Karma 2 and Bad Behaviour in the hope of reducing the comment spam – before with just the built-in blacklisting I was having to set all GMail posters to moderated status, for instance, and it was a losing battle tracking the ever-changing splogs. I get about 10 to 20 or so spam comments and trackbacks per day here.

My blog no longer appears on the Google front page when searching for what japan thinks from my home and work PCs at least, although it’s nice to see that I am being correctly syndicated by a couple of news sources, even though nobody asked me before doing it!

Finally, I’m Blog of the Week at Planet Japan Podcast Episode 48, so it seems, but I haven’t had time to listen to it yet! The bit about What Japan Thinks starts at 13 minutes and 34 seconds into the show, so please pay them a visit!

I’m sure you’ve felt that the site hasn’t been updated with its usual frequency the last week, but I have a genuine excuse. As well as just enjoying the holiday break, I’ve actually recently been prescribed Paxil and Wypax, which seems to be a Japanese formulation of Lorazepam, with a bonus dose of Gasmotin. The first two drugs seem like scary beasties, but I’m on just about the lowest dose for each, so touch wood…
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