世論 What Japan Thinks

Just another quick note that there’s another wee interview with me up on Blog Interviewer. Hope you enjoy! Please visit and vote for me!

Just a quick note that there’s a wee interview with me up on Blogs On Japan. Hope you enjoy it!

Sorry folks, but for some reason my host blew up today – I think someone else on the shared hosting overdid their quota and brought me down in the process.

To make up for it, please accept a free chou cream (cream puff) courtesy of Beard Papa, a big Japanese chain that has a presence around many stations, and I hope near you too.

To collect your free chou cream, first send a blank email to pa@adada.jp from your mobile phone. Fill out the very short questionnaire (just one screen) on the web page pointed to by the URL you get returned, and select the Beard Papa shop from which you would like to get said free chou cream. You’ll get another email with a URL, which you must not click until you are queueing up at the shop, as the coupon is only valid for 15 minutes after you open the URL. Show your mobile phone screen to the staff, and you’ll get one free plain cream puff.

It worked for me, so let me know if it works for you, and please pass on to your friends!

First, a big hello to a new Featured Link, Goddess Carlie’s jDrama reviews, where she leads us through the Japanese TV drama world, teaching us some Japanese along the way. Nice and clean site design, good writing, and if you spend a lot of time in front of Japanese telly, this looks like a good place to help you get more out of it! Pop over and see if it is your cup of green tea.

Talking of learning Japanese, Bill at Rising Sun of Nihon informs me of a new manga comic strip he is running called Ello Bello and written by Kan Shinoy, an aspiring artist, it seems.

I’m off from tomorrow on holiday, so expect to see the posting frequency drop considerably. I’ve got roughly one every two or three days lined up from now, including a great one this Sunday, so I hope that can tide you over until I return!

Just a quick reminder to some of my readers – as well as this blog I also post assorted ramblings to a weekly newsletter. In addition to a round-up of the week’s post, I add some stories that have caught my eye, and I talk a bit about my experiments in running and optimising this blog. I don’t claim to be an expert in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), but perhaps you might enjoy watching me stumble along the blogging path! Other SEO blogs perhaps talk to you from a seemingly unobtainably high level, but I just do as much as I can in an hour or so per week, so if I can see a benefit from that I hope that might encourage you to have a go too.

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In addition, I’ve also recently launched My Buddhist Name. Have a play with it and tell me what you think.

I’ve just been informed that Alex over at Victory Manual (a new blog to me, but it’s been added to my RSS feed reader) has started his own Blog Matsuri-type idea, called JBAR, Japan Blog Article Roundup, with this month being on the subject of “remote”.

Good luck to him! I don’t think I’ve got anything terribly relevant to the theme this month, however.

Just a short bit of news about the Recommend Google Pack WordPress plugin I developed recently: it has been selected by a German web site Flash Boutique SEO as one of eight “Die besten WordPress Plugins“

As you may have noticed in the right sidebar, I have a new featured link, this time the potentially rather useful Piqniq.jp, a Social Networking Service/blog/forum targeted towards gaijins in Japan, it seems, although I must admit to not having used it! I hope you’ll pay them a visit or two, and I hope they’ll stick around for a bit, as it’s always nice to get relevant advertisers for a change.

If you’d like to be a featured link too, please visit my advertising options page for details.

Perhaps you’ve already noticed one or two messages appearing at the top of this site’s pages; initially I had the What Would Seth Godin Do plugin installed, but I fancied taking it further, so by using functionality from the WordPress Browser Detection plugin, I came up with a small plugin called Recommend Google Pack that recommends Google Pack to new visitors running Explorer on Windows (in addition to the existing WWSGD part), to see if people would help support What Japan Thinks by downloading the packs. Sadly, I’ve no customers yet!
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