世論 What Japan Thinks

japan.internet.com recently reported on the results of a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into what bosses thought about their subordinates blogging (and other unreported topics related to business blogs). They interviewed 330 people managers in public and private companies; a mere 5.2% were female (see other surveys on this subject), 0.9% in their twenties, 20.0% in their thirties, 53.9% in their forties, 21.2% in their fifties, and 3.3% in their sixties. Just these demographics alone are fascinating!

My direct boss has read this blog on occassion, but I always have the concern that perhaps someone in the personel department may be monitoring it for any statement that I may make which are against some company policy or other. Therefore I try to avoid telling about how really horrid wonderful my job is. Here’s one bit of hopefully non-confidential information: I am from 5pm today the longest-serving foreigner in our division, as the guy ahead of me just quit. I don’t know whether to to be proud or depressed.

Have any of my readers in Japan got into trouble for blogging? Hopefully nothing as serious as an American resident in Korea who got sacked for blogging about how Korea’s view on one aspect of history may not be correct.
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goo Rankings (forgive me publishing yet another goo Ranking!) published a summary of the top-linked sites from their blog service.

Since this is not a survey, there’s obviously no demographic information, instead it had been generated from looking at all the outgoing links from all the blog entries posted during the month of December.
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of an opinion poll conducted by goo Research towards the end of November into sponsored blogging. 1,093 people from their internet monitor group successfully completed a private internet-based poll. 57.0% of the sample was female, 2.1% in their teens, 20.4% in their twenties, 42.4% in their thirties, 24.9% in their forties, and 10.2% in their fifties.

This practice is often disparagingly called “astroturfing”, meaning faking grass roots support. When it is disguised support, I hate it too, but when made clear I don’t really mind it; to illustrate using my current AdWords advertisers, the subtle and distrusted astroturfing would be something like:

By the way, recently I’ve been dabbling in hedge funds, and found the info at HedgeSynergy invaluable…

The obvious format, which Japundit do really well (now, did they pay me to say that?), is:

You may wish to visit my sponsor at Hayden-Harnett, which seems to be selling rather nice accessories and the like.

My personal least favourite is the habit of using (disclosure: I have a relationship with the company) which to me always reads as (disclosure: they pay me to say this).

There’s also a company PayPerPost which, as the name perhaps suggests, pays you to post about a product or service; actually, they are more of an introduction service, introducing advertisers with advertisees. I’ve not used them though, and I don’t think that sort of blogging would fit in well with this web site.
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japan.internet.com recently published extracted highlights from goo Research’s 28th regular blogging survey. This time, one of the reported statistics was on why people quit. At the start of November 1,041 members of goo Research’s monitor pool replied to the online questionnaire. 53.5% of the sample was female, 2.3% in their teens, 24.0% in their twenties, 38.7% in their thirties, 21.7% in their forties, 10.1% in their fifties, and 3.2% aged sixty or older.

I felt the answers to the quitting reason were a bit difficult to interpret (from a logical point of view, not from a translation one!), especially the top reason, given by over two-thirds, of updating being just too much of a pain – 「更新が面倒になったから」, “henshin ga mendouni nattakara”. I’ve not used the Japanese blogging services so I don’t know how user-friendly they are, but was it formatting the content that was awkward, or maintaining the design, pruning spam, replying to comments, or other housekeeping tasks?

For me personally, I’ve thought about quitting for time reasons and a lack of search engine positioning; I don’t try any particular SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) techniques, but with nearly 500 distinct articles in Google and friends, I get a disappointingly low number of visits – I just recently got through 200 per day excluding one dodgy pr0n keyword that gives me just a bit too much traffic.
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goo Ranking recently published statistics of the number of outbound links from blogs it manages under the http://blog.goo.ne.jp brand.

This being raw statistics, there’s no sample size, and note that some of the links might be to more than one page within a site, not just the top page.
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japan.internet.com recently reported on goo Research’s 27th regular monthly survey into blogs. The reported results this time were for the basics of blogging. Over four days at the start of September they interviewed 1,074 people from their internet monitor group. Demographically, 56.0% were female, 2.6% in their teens, 21.6% in their twenties, 41.2% in their thirties, 20.6% in their forties, 10.8% in their fifties, and 3.3% aged sixty or older.

I’d love to see how these figures compare with other countries; over half the bloggers update at least once a week, with women 8 percentage points higher than men. Blogs are now almost universally known, and with over a third of the people having blogged, blogging is becoming a standard practice for internet users.

It’s also interesting to see that men prefer the passive communication of trackbacks, whilst women much prefer actively commenting on other people’s blogs.

Finally, I’d like to see them ask how many people have their own hosted solution.
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This rather buzzword-overloaded title refers to the results of a survey at the start of this month by goo Research, published by japan.internet.com, on spreading memes, or baton touching, to use the Japanese-English terminology; baton is the meme, touching is the spreading of it. 1,092 members of their monitor pool successfully completed an internet-based private poll; 56.8% of the sample was female, 2.4% in their teens, 21.9% in their twenties, 46.3% in their thirties, and 29.4% in their forties,

Here the meme is the creation and spreading of a set of questions through the blogosphere (uggh, buzzword overload!); you get tagged by someone, answer a set of questions on a theme in a post to your blog, ending by selecting five more victims to take their turn in answering, as in this, the first English example I could find through Google, or this, a Japanese blog dedicated to passing the baton. “Baton touch” is, as indicated, yet another Japanese-English phrase, just in case you are confused by it, where we would probably use “baton pass” instead in English. Apparently if you pop onto mixi and search for バトン, baton, you can find no end of them to join in with.

Note that apparently this baton passing is also being used for PR campaigns, and for CGM, Consumer Generated Media, but as to what form this takes, I am yet to learn.
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japan.internet.com reported on goo Research’s 26th monthly survey on blogging. 1,075 people from goo’s internet monitor group successfully completed a private questionnaire at the start of July. The demographics were 58.4% female, 3.3% in their teens, 25.6% in their twenties, 39.4% in their thirties, 22.0% in their forties, 7.8% in their fifties, and 2.0% aged sixty or over.

Looking at the headline, if you discount the “don’t knows” as having too little traffic to bother counting, on a good day I’m in the top 2% percent of Japanese blogs traffic-wise! Of course, another explanation is that the bloggers with more traffic are too busy keeping their sites ticking over to bother answering questionnaires.

It also may be instructive to cross-reference these results with over 90% of bloggers being anonymous and most bloggers earning peanuts in affiliate schemes.
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japan.internet.com, in conjunction with goo Research, recently published the results of a survey into what people think when blogs crash and burn. They interviewed by means of a private internet questionnaire 1,084 people from their monitor group, 57.1% female, 22.9% in their twenties, 43.4% in their thirties, 24.4% in their forties, and 9.2% in their fifties.

I must admit to quite enjoying a flame war on the whole, as long as the level of abuse remains relatively intelligent. However, this being the internet, things usually deteriorate to either mindless flaming or argument by Google, where people quote the first URL they find that agrees with their position.

Now I think about it, I do dislike a real flare-up; intelligent abuse is usually not serious, I feel, and will soon blow over.
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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.