世論 What Japan Thinks

Perhaps mainly due to the ease of embedding video into third party web pages, YouTube still has a lead of over three-to-one over its nearest competitor in the Japanese video sharing league. To find out more about how people use these sites, japan.internet.com reported on a survey by Cross Marketing Inc that looked at video file sharing.

Demographics

Over the 8th and 9th of August 2007 300 members of Cross Marketing Inc’s online monitor group completed a private online questionnaire. The sample was split 50:50 male and female, and 20.0% in their teens, 20.0% in their twenties, 20.0% in their thirties, 20.0% in their forties, 20.0% in their fifties.

If you want to look at Nico Nico Douga – oops, I’ve just looked at Nico Nico Douga, and new free accounts are limited to access between 2 am and 7 pm. I think their commenting system allows messages to be overlaid on videos, so if anyone knows the details, please leave a message!
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Second Life from Linden Labs, a virtual world that is gaining a lot of support from major companies in Japan but is still to actually officially launch in the country has been getting a lot of press coverage recently. To find out how it was affecting the average consumer, MyVoice performed a survey about using Second Life.

Demographics

Over the first five days of August 2007 12,386 members of the MyVoice online community successfully completed an online survey. 54% of the sample was female, 2% in their teens, 18% in their twenties, 38% in their thirties, 28% in their forties, and 14% in their fifties.

I’m not sure what the correct verb to use for being in Second Life is. “Play” seems too trivial and “be” sounds pompous, so I’ll just stick with the neutral but dull “use”, which is actually the direct translation of the Japanese verb used by MyVoice.

I’m sure one could draw conclusions from Q2, where the image of being unable to communicate with foreigners was stronger than that of being able to communicate with them!
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I’m glad it’s not just me, as whenever we have a video tele-conference at work I always try to hide out of the way of the camera, and just can’t bring myself to look at my own face on screen. I can just about cope with my photo in private, but seeing myself on the big screen is just too much for me! This fact in the headline was one of the interesting facts to come out of a recent survey by Cross Marketing Inc and reported by japan.internet.com on the subject of web cameras.

Demographics

On the 18th and 19th of July 2007 300 members of Cross Marketing Inc’s online monitor group successfully completed a private internet-based questionnaire. The sample was exactly 50:50 male and female, and 20.0% in their teens, 20.0% in their twenties, 20.0% in their thirties, 20.0% in their forties, and 20.0% in their fifties.

As a cross-reference, back in October of last year MyVoice looked at video calling on mobile phones, and there they found a similar lack of enthusiasm for video calling on mobile phones.
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I’ve never actually participated in an online auction myself, but the stories I hear about eBay’s security problems and about fraudulent auctions fair put me off wanting to try, despite stories about some people getting lucky. So, I was interested to read a column on japan.internet.com about research conducted by goo Research into the subject of internet auctions.

Demographics

Between the 10th and 13th of July 2007 1,077 members of goo Research’s online monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.3% of the sample was male, 17.7% in their teens, 18.8% in their twenties, 16.2% in their thirties, 16.6% in their forties, 18.9% in their fifties, and 11.7% aged sixty or older.

There is, of course, many sites that specialise in highlighting the tat and other interesting rubbish that people try to flog on online auctions; here are a few of my favourites:

Who would buy that?
What the heck?
hexadecimal – the oddities of eBay motors
Strange Japanese auctions
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I’ve never heard (as it were) of people surfing under voice control at work (excluding swearing at the browser for crashing or the internet for being slow, of course) but a recent survey reported on by japan.internet.com and conducted by JR Tokai Express Research on browsing at work showed that these sort of people do exist.

Demographics

On the 7th of June 2007 333 members of JR Tokai Express Research’s online monitor pool employed in private industry completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 70.9% of the sample were male, 10.5% in their twenties, 52.0% in their thirties, 29.1% in their forties, 6.0% in their fifties, and 2.4% in their sixties.

Sadly there was no question asked (or at least not reported) on how much of the time was spent on work-related versus private-related activities. Our workplace strictly forbids private surfing.

Q2 is a bit confusing to answer regarding feed reading – does using services like Google Reader or Bloglines count as using a feed reader? Therefore, I find the figures in that table a bit unreliable. I also wonder why so many people don’t know how they are surfing.
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With Japanese mobile cameras capable of scanning QR codes and doing OCR of text, and with television and print advertisements frequently featuring search keywords, and even RFID-enabled advertising terminals, it’s a refreshing change to see the pictured decidedly low-tech advertisement.

The katakana script text reads “Daburyu Daburyu Daburyu Dotto Obamasen Dotto Comu”, or in plain English www.obamasen.com, an advertisement for the Obama railway line running alongside the Japan Sea on the northern shores of Hyogo prefecture, not some cryptic message of support for Sen. Obama, the US presidential candidate!

japan.internet.com recently reported on a survey conducted between the 26th and 28th of April by goo Research into the trustworthiness of internet information.

Demographics

1,041 members of goo Research’s online monitor group successfully completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 51.8% of the sample was male, 18.9% in their teens, 22.8% in their twenties. 19.9% in their thirties, 19.4% in their forties, and 19.0% in their fifties.

The results here really took me aback! Commercial blogs, which by definition are trying to sell you stuff, top the charts, whereas CEO blogs are the least trusted, even though the CEO has a legal obligation (I hope, at least) to tell the truth (or at least not lie) or face prison whereas commercial blogs are trying to sell you stuff and will always tell you how they are better than brand X.

Note that Q1 should really be phrased as “Have you ever obtained information that you determined was incorrect?”

Sadly, this time the presented results fail to directly mention anything about trust in Wikipedia.
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japan.internet.com published the results of a survey conducted by goo Research into what brands people associate with internet services. Over three days at the start of February 1,083 people from their monitor group successfully completed a private online questionnaire. The male-female split was half-and-half to three significant digits; there was one more male than female respondent. 13.5% were in their teens, 11.5% in their twenties, 14.9% in their thirties, 18.2% in their forties, 20.0% in their fifties, and 22.0% in their sixties.

On a statistical note, recently goo Research’s samples seem to be more balanced both sex and age-wise; they used to be around 55:45 male to female and biased towards the thirties age group, but this is the second time recently I’ve noticed a more balanced age spread.

I reported on a similar survey conducted this time last year, so it may be instructive to cross-reference. Google has surpassed Yahoo! for search; this trend is also visible, but not so strongly, in actual search engine use. Regarding shopping, Rakuten Marketplace retains their huge lead over Amazon, perhaps due in part to their bordering-on-spam use (abuse!) that they make of your mail address, one reason I will never shop there. They do not have a one-click unsubscribe option, and they freely share your mail address between all the shops there. Even if you just use the Y-Not! free email greeting card service that they bought out last year, they automatically subscribe you to their system and pass the address on to their shops. You have been warned!
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japan.internet.com recently reported on a survey conducted by Cross Marketing Inc in the middle of November into the use of web sites from mobile phones. 300 mobile phone owners, 50.0% male and 50.0% female, with 20.0% in their teens, and 20.0% in their twenties, thirties, forties and fifties completed the private internet-based survey.
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of an opinion poll conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into the subject of online stocks and shares trading. They interviewed 330 people employed in public or private enterprises; 82.4% of the sample was male, 10.9% in their twenties, 49.1% in their thirties, 32.7% in their forties, 6.7% in their fifties, and 0.6% in their sixties.

I know there’s a few people in my office who do online trading, but I don’t know what sort of portfolio they have outside of the company’s own employee share system, or how active they are. I used to have a few shares from privatisations back home, and come to think of it, I might even have some hiding somewhere that I’ve lost touch with. Didn’t Standard Life go private recently and give away many free shares to the policy holders?
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