世論 What Japan Thinks

It seemed to be popular last year, so I thought I’d remind you all that you can buy a lucky bag, or in Japanese, 福袋, fukubukuro, from Strapya filled with 18 cellphone straps to a value of over $130 for just $27 or so (depending on exchange rates), a saving of 80% on the retail price.

Help yourself to a bargain (and help out me) buy picking one up today!

I’ve moved (or more correctly, Google told me I have to move!) my RSS feed to http://feedproxy.google.com/WhatJapanThinks, and I have signed up for advertisements within the feed.

For posts over 100 words or so you should see one Google ad at the bottom. I’ll run them for a month and if they aren’t doing much, I’ll ditch them. Hope you don’t mind. If you notice any problems, please give me a shout.

Thanks,
Ken Y-N

When I wrote my iPhone R.I.P. article last month a lot of people told me I was completely wrong for making such a big deal out of emoji as the key feature missing on Apple’s iPhone in Japan.

However, at a recent press conference, Masayoshi Son, the CEO of SoftBank, the Japanese carrier for the iPhone, said the following about the planned update of the iPhone software and the addition of emoji:

“Email without emoticons can’t be email in Japan. We persuaded Apple Computer (to localize iPhones for the Japanese market).”

Since I’m tooting my own blog’s horn here, I’d also like to point out that Apple still need to add a retro CHTML (iMode-like) browser and a strap hook.

You might have seen that to celebrate their 10th anniversary, Google has put their index from 2001 online. Let’s try a few searches and see how Japan looked then:

• Ken Y-N was Welsh
• What Japan Thinks thought about privatisation
• Japan Probe was favourable to Microsoft
• Japundit did not exist
• Danny Choo was Choo Choo Records
• Japan Soc was a newsgroup
• Tokyo Times was on Interesting People
• Trans-Pacific Radio was nuclear fallout
• Debito was still Debito
• an englishman in osaka was an englishman in new york
• The Long Countdown was 335 days, 2 hours and 4 minutes away from Christmas
• Nihon Hacks was a translation hack
• SUICA was someone in Guatamala
• taspo was the Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra
• mixi was a Finnish kennel and cattery
• 3Yen was the non-consolidated interim financial results
• Japan Blog Matsuri was some eyecandy to start your day right
• TV In Japan provided top quality information via the borderless digital media
• Watashi to Tokyo had a pet name problem
• And finally, Gaijin Tonic was Gaijin A-GOGO

There’s the new AdSense for Feeds out, which works with FeedBurner but not very flexibly yet.

However, I have a cunning idea, so if it works you will see this in your RSS reader along with an advertisement…

PS: What do you think about ads in RSS? I’ll only stick them at the end of longer survey posts, not short ones like this, except for this time since I’m just testing…

I’m off on holiday for around ten days or so, so although I’ve queued up a number of posts, the volume of posting will be lower than usual. I hopefully will have time to log on occassionally to clean up any spam that might appear.

Thank you for your understanding.

Just a note to say that I’ve added a new page describing a very interesting and effective way for those of you freelancing in English teaching to earn more! Check out my review of the English Coash System by Adam Beck!

It really does look like a very good way to double your income from private lessons.

I know I’ve got a couple of readers who are active in Second Life and my Second Life surveys seem to go down quite well, and I can’t find much on this elsewhere, so here’s a quick report on Panasonic’s Maze opening up in Second Life.

Apparently, just search the Second Life world map for Panasonic (or just click here) so you can teleport to their maze. There you’ll find an Olympic stadium (let’s all dress up as Tibetans and picket it…), an eco zone, a Viera living room zone where you can experience their 150 inch television, history of Panasonic zone, and finally, the rather bizzare Joba zone, where you can virtually experience their virtual exercise horse while watching a virtual television that virtually presents the virtual you virtually riding on your virtual virtual virtual horse through a virtual show jumping course, or something virtually similar to that.

It’s probably already under development, but imagine if you could buy an adapter to map movement of an in-game horse to your Joba, or even better, team up with Nintendo to create virtual jousting. Throw in a Wii with Wii Fit, and you can have also have hand-to-hand combat when you get virtually toppled from your nag!

You may remember the Neko-punch Google-slap I got for running Text Link Ads that I reported on last year. Having seen my income die horribly in AdSense then slowly wither through Text Link Ads, I finally decided to ditch TLA, then use Google’s Webmaster Tools to beg for my PageRank back. I did this on Sunday, and checking today I noticed I’d got my two lost ranks back. I’ll watch to see if this has any significant effect on my AdSense, although talking to another who was in the same boat I don’t hold out much hope.

I would say thanks to Bloomberg, but I don’t think they deserve it. I posted on Sunday about Shane’s tale of the poison gas recipe, and I see they’ve now updated their story to remove the unnecessarily-detailed information of how to make the gas.

Oh, and the animated neko punch (cat punch) gif above is doing the rounds of Japanese mobiles. I’ve set it up as the backdrop for all the various mail exchange actions on my phone too, so please feel free to steal it off me!

Just as a note to my readers (and as a prompt to the search engines) I’d like to highlight that I’ve started a news round-up blog on the topic of trusted computing. It’s a subject I’m interested and involved in, so it’s useful for me as an archive of news and developments in the world of trusted computing.