世論 What Japan Thinks

I’m having to moving across everything by hand from my old site! There is a script to do it automatically, but as I need to go through all the posts and add the categories, it’s almost as fast, I suppose, to do it by hand.

I’m also listed on Google already! Searching for “what japan thinks” shows me on the front page already. My old site, after almost three months of hard blogging, is still languishing down on the ninth page…

This blog will soon be moving! Thanks to Blogger I got the confidence to start blogging, but performance (clicking New Post, for instance, often takes close to a minute to load) and uptime recently has been pretty poor, I think, and the final straw was an update at the weekend that broke posting from Opera – it would only publish a blank page. I eventually chose to sign up with the guys at BlueHost:

The new address is http://www.whatjapanthinks.com (hopefully the DNS is working), and I selected BlueHost as it seemed to be one of the best deals around, although I can’t get their auto install of WordPress to work! That’s another thing, I’m migrating to WordPress as the categories are pretty essential for getting the surveys organised and making it easier for the readers to navigate the site.

UPDATE: Finally managed to get it installed after about six attempts, both automatic and manual. Hurrah!

I’m having a rest from translation today, so instead I’ll post a few interesting stats of my own. Google AdSense last month earned enough beer money for one 500 ml can of Asahi Super Dry at vending machine prices, and at this rate it will be sometime in the summer of 2008 when I actually break the $100 minimum payout balance! I passed 2,000 visitors yesterday, averaging about 40 or so per day, but much of that is through BlogExplosion. However, about 20% of my hits are from other sources, which is nice. I’m the 53th most authoratitive blog on Japan, according to Technorati. Got a Page Rank of , but still languishing on page 10 of Google when searching for my blog title, but people still get here from Google searches that suggest my nearest Google cached index is wonky, or something – I’m fourth on page 10 from home, but eighth from work. I surprise myself with some of the statistics I translate, like the dekichatta kekkon stuff yesterday. Must add the Google section targetting stuff to get my sidebar ignored and blog entry highlighted to hopefully reduce the number of rather useless blog-related ads that appear. Shiron is ticking along nicely too, with people picking up articles from both places. Nonsense feels more popular than facts, however. I’d love to buy a domain name and dedicated host, but I need a decent recommendation and a good excuse to part with the money!

UPDATE: Got a link to one of my articles from the Lost Budgie – thanks! My first proper inbound link that I didn’t have to ask for!

Things are ticking along quite nicely now. I’ve launched a sister blog to this one, 私論 – Shiron – What I Think that covers more chatty personal blog stuff on the whole, and perhaps the occasional rant about life in Japan. Excuse the rather egotistical title, but I might as well be up front about it!

Search engines are looking good – Google rating for the site itself using the blog’s title is still rather poor, but other keywords seem to work quite well! Search logs show a few good hits from Google, MSN and Yahoo! (about 10% of my traffic is now from search or directories), but not Google Blogs, however. Blog Explosion still ticks along, but I’m using it in a much more efficient manner now, I hope. I’ve done a few trackbacks and blog comment postings to get the word around, but I’m still to get even one decent incoming link outside of directories. Also, as there seems to be a Google Page Rank update going on at the moment, I find according to a site I can’t find again that my Page Rank has jumped from 0 to 4, mostly, I think, thanks to Jim Breen and his fine list of Japan-related links. I’d be lost without his WWWJDICT to hand for my translation needs.

It’s a bit disappointing, however, that my other blog has got more comments for the mindless nonsense that I’ve written there than this place, where I’ve put in well over 100 hours of effort in the last two months! Oh well, but at least I’m writing this as a reference source, not as a popularity contest.

I’m still to earn beer (singular) money from my AdSense – I think I could just afford to buy a cheap and nasty chuhai right now from Google.

The bad news: I had a complaint from one of the people whose material I translated due to my rather blatant spicing up of the story for hits. That experiment worked far too well, resulting in a 50% increase in traffic due to a wonky algorithm in MSN Search, which had decided to promote me to second place for various pr0n-related keywords. I’ve deleted the original and reposted a cleaned-up translation.

Sorry folks, but real life is still very busy, and may be hectic for another couple of weeks as I’m studying for a kanji exam that should be quite tricky, given my total inability to write kanji properly! I’ve also decided I should open another blog to allow my more creative side (if I have one, of course) to develop, or at least just provide an outlet for general moaning about Japan, life and everything, and a test-bed for various blogging tools and stuff. I’ll officially announce it once I get it set up correctly and get a wee bit of content.

I’ve had an embarrassingly huge amount of hits for my H*T N*K*D J*P*N*S* T**NS post! Almost 25% of my traffic for a week came in through Technorati tags, and just this week I’ve got into the MSN Search index and been having a steady flow of hits from pervie searches. I’ve had but one Google hit in all the time I’ve been in there, but MSN Search seems to be turning up the goods for me.

Well, it’s now been just about a month since I started this blog, so I think a short retrospective is in order. First, the good stuff:

• Registered with most of the main directories and search engines
• Even getting some hits from above
• Done a lot of interesting (to me anyway) research and translations
• Managed to average just about one post a day
• Got a reasonably slick authoring environment with HTML-Kit
• AdSense monetisation set up

Now the bad stuff:

• Lack of punters
• Lack of comments – one real one, one spam so far
• Google ranking pretty poor – even seron what japan thinks hits blog directories first
• One solitary AdSense click
• Blog Explosion has been a waste of time

To explore the bad stuff further, first let us consider Blog Explosion. On paper it sounds great, for every two blogs you surf, you get credit for one hit in return, basically. However, the hits are extremely poor quality, as everyone, me included, is just clicking through to get credits. Admittedly, I’ve found two blogs that are interesting, the first being Blurred Line Blog, and especially his ongoing experiment with buying credits for Blog Explosion and tracking the hits. It’s also refreshing to find a blog written by someone who understands the English language correctly. The second is Tom’s Astronomy Blog. I’m not much of a fan of the science, per se, but he has a great set of pictures from his telescope and elsewhere and writes up descriptions for them that very clearly express his love of the stars. Both would be feeds for my RSS Reader, if I had one!

Next, the lack of punters and comments. Well, I suppose it’s early days, so I can’t expect a healthy readership instantly, and I’ve not tried networking much at all. This problem ties in with the Blog Explosion experience above, I feel, as with Blog Explosion you need to spend thirty seconds surfing to get one viewer (assuming you assign all your credits to buying hits), who is probably only going to spend the minimal time on your page just so they can get their credit to spend on another pair of useless eyeballs. To get 30 visitors (my current daily average) I need to spend probably 20 minutes (allowing for overhead) surfing. But, if in that 20 minutes I instead search for a blog with a recent posting on a similar topic matter to mine – Google Blogs and Technorati are good places to look for candidates – and write a comment that either just has my top-level URL in the header or specifically links to one of my relevant stories, I should in theory get targeted traffic. I’ve only done this twice or thrice, mind you, and have had merely one or two hits in return, but if I can do twenty posts and once catch the blog owner’s eye, the chance of getting a trackback or even a blogroll entry increases, and a permanent link is worth it for getting that essential boost in the search engines.

I suppose all the other negative things are caused by the lack of punters, so I’ll just have to keep plugging away and see what happens. I genuinely believe that this blog will provide a useful database for someone, whether it just be settling Internet arguments about Japan, such as when discussing Japanese religiosity or lack thereof; or whether it be for more serious business reasons, such as trying to get a feel for Japanese public opinion on topics that perhaps rarely get translated. I really do feel I have some unique (within the context of the English language world) content here!

To conclude, one of my Technorati blog tags is public opinion. I am the solitary blog so tagged, and looking at the individual post tags, public opinion shows my own blog with five out of the latest ten entries (it would be more but Technorati is slow to update my blog, and I didn’t start tagging until recently), which must demonstrate something, probably about how ego-centric the average blogger is!

Doing some study at work on patents, trademarks and copyright issues in Japan in Japanese, I found out that for the results of opinion polls and the like, copyright law does not apply, except in the case where the words “Reproduction Prohibited” (Japanese: 禁転載) are present along with the data, therefore this blog does not infringe copyright on the surveys as far as I can determine. The write-up on the surveys is covered by copyright, especially when opinion or other human creativity is expressed, so I still need to find out if the concept of “Fair Use” is enshrined in Japanese law. My translations and reportage are copyright as they contain considerable creative effort (although it might not seem like it all the time) but they may be derivative works, depending on how literally I translate the stories. I should be able to get away with “Fair Use” (unlike manga and anime translator who also claim it) as I don’t use all the source material, and I believe I add value only with my comments or with the uncopyrightable raw data.

Of course, I am not a lawyer, Japanese or any other nationality, so please take my advice only with a rather generous pinch of salt, and remember how much you have paid for this advice.

– now in Google, but still no links to me to be found — got a strange hit from Yahoo! mail — need a better counter than SiteMeter — worked out how to write a macro in HTML-Kit, so can do tables faster — all other Blog Explosion users just perform click throughs, never read, just like me too — Google Blog Search returns rather poor results for the keyword “Japan” — translating is fun! — lots and lots of stats to translate, historical comparisons might be fun — trying HaloScan, but might bin their comments and stick with Blogger — goodnight all –

Had a hard day at the office today, so no translations. Sorry folks.

Now, some stuff about blogging – if you just want links, signing up for some of these blog collectives is a good way of doing it. I use Blog Explosion, amongst others, which seems a good way to force traffic to your site. It’s probably very low-quality eyeballs, but I’m just starting here, so any exposure is welcome.

Google has also picked me up indirectly, but not found my address directly yet. I have a short-term goal to get into the top page for a search on seron, and a longer-term goal for a different phrase, which I won’t publicise so as not to artifically get it pumped by any well-meaning reader. Once I get the second goal, I will seriously work on monetising this blog.

Back to BlogExplosion – browsing the links proves Sturgeon’s Law, I’m afraid! There’s been a couple of interesting and fully pages, but mostly… sigh!

I use HTML-Kit to edit this page. You can’t go wrong at the price, and although a little unwieldy – I wish tables were easier! – it does the business. Blogger’s own WYSIWYG editor doesn’t work properly on Opera, and anyway it’s good to save stuff off-line too just in case.

It’s quite frustrating, but at my workplace we have access to masses of surveys of our company’s products and that of our competitors too. Quite fascinating figures are contained within, but sadly company confidentiality prevents me from translating them for the benefit of my readers.