世論 What Japan Thinks

A little while back goo Ranking published the results of a poll into the top 30 new internet words. Many of these neologisms are unlikely to ever find their way into a dictionary, other than perhaps one of the Wiki family, of course. As usual for goo Ranking, the top vote gets 100 points, and all the rest get a value representing the percentage of votes relative to the number one choice.

As you might suspect, many of these words were coined on 2 Channel.

As I no doubt have made many, many mistakes, please feel free to correct me!
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japan.internet.com recently reported on a survey by goo Research into web site navigation issues. At the end of October they interviewed 1,093 members of their montior group with five or more years of internet experience by means of a private internet-based survey. 50.05% were male (interestingly, lower than the usual goo monitor ratio of closer to 60%), with 19.0% in their twenties, 44.2% in their thirties, 26.4% in their forties, and 10.4% in their fifties.

Regarding scrolling left and right, I recently got a new mouse with a scroll wheel that goes left and right as well as up and down. However, I can’t say I’ve actually ever remembered to use the left-right feature, and in fact it causes more trouble than it’s worth as a wheel-click in my Opera browser opens a link in a new window, but it’s too easy to accidentally push the wheel to the right at the same time, causing Opera not to recognise my click.
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of a survey by goo Research into revealing personal information on the internet where people other than friends can read it. In the middle of October 1,052 of goo’s monitor pool successfully completed a private web-based questionnaire. 56.4% of the sample was female, and 2.5% in their teens, 22.0% in their twenties, 42.7% in their thirties, 23.7% in their forties, and 9.2% in their fifties. Regular readers may remember a previous survey on a similar subject showing that over 90% of bloggers were anonymous.

Although the survey’s main theme is about the online world, the first two questions presented in the summary report actually refer to issues regarding real-world businesses. It seems odd to me that people are twice as wary of giving out their date of birth over the internet than in real life.

Personally, I feel reluctant to revealing my email address in particular, as I’m never sure what spam I’ll end up with, and a lot of Japanese companies, even reputable ones, do not provide simple one-click unsubscribe options.
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With both Amazon and Apple recently opening film and video download services, towards the end of September japan.internet.com, in conjunction with goo Research, looked at what people thought about downloading movies. 1,043 people from their internet monitor group, 55.5% female, successfully completed a private internet survey. 21.8% were in their twenties, 40.1% in their thirties, 25.9% in their forties, 9.1% in their fifties, and 3.2% in their sixties.

The results here are interesting; although there is a slight majority not interested in downloading, those who download want to watch on the television. However, with the proliferation of wide-screen televisions, high-definition broadcasts and Blue Ray disks, a standard lower-than-DVD quality download might look rather poor on a 38 inch plasma display.
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infoPLANT recently published the results of a survey they conducted into the use of mobile phone web sites. As usual for infoPLANT, they gained their respondents by means of a self-selecting public questionnaire, available for a week at the end of August through DoCoMo’s iMode mobile phone menuing system. 4,472 people, 62.1% female, successfully completed the survey.

Whenever I publish a translation of infoPLANT’s surveys I always add a disclaimer about the self-selecting nature of the survey. However, this survey gives a good picture of the habits of heavy iMode users, as I believe most of the infoPLANT respondents are, so this can be a good reference when trying to understand the other polls they have conducted.

Also, when I saw the results of the poll, I couldn’t resist the temptation to run the story with such a title!
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japan.internet.com published the results of a survey by goo Research into the use of web site passwords carried out at the start of this month. 1,091 members of goo’s research monitor group successfully completed the private web-based questionnaire. 56.7% of the sample was female, and 20.3% were in their twenties, 41.5% in their thirties, 24.5% in their forties, 10.2% in their fifties, and 3.6% in their sixties.

The stunning figure is that 266 people, or 24.4%, admitted to using a password identical to their user name, if allowed by the web site. 43.4% said they wrote it down, which arguably can be better than memorising a simpler one, although no questions were asked in this survey on how complex passwords were.

This survey highlights perhaps two possible approaches to hacking in addition to the headline’s method of using the same user name and password. Another would be a phishing attack, but one that on password entry presented a password error. Since almost half the people say they repeatedly guess at the password, this type of fake site might yield multiple passwords for various sites. Finally, an attack that I have never heard of, but seems ridiculously simple for such situations as online game bulletin boards for competing clans, where, by means of a backdoor into the password routines, one can extract user names and passwords which can then be used for whatever purposes, once you track down the places that that user frequents.

Back on the subject of personal password management, I once tried using a password management tool, but it was excessively cryptic and after entering two or three passwords I forgot exactly how to go about entering a master password, and couldn’t recover from the situation, so I had to delete the tool!

I can’t find a similar survey of passwords from other countries, but if anyone can provide a link, it would make a useful comparison.
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japan.internet.com recently reported on JR Tokai Express Research’s survey into bookmarking habits. Towards the end of July they interviewed 331 internet users from their monitor group: 67.4% were male, 13.6% in their twenties, 35.3% in their thirties, 35.0% in their forties, 12.1% in their fifties, and 3.9% in their sixties.

This is an interesting set of questions, although I would have also liked to have seen Q1 as a multiple answer question. For Q3, I’d like to say I use an RSS reader, but only low-traffic sites (up to four or five new items per day) get into my reader; any more and I feel I would rather just use my bookmarks so I can scan headlines faster and easier. Incidentally, just less than half of the Japanese survey sites I regularly scan offer an RSS feed for their updates, which is a bit of a pain.
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Just over a month ago japan.internet.com reported on a survey by JR Tokai Express Research into online payments. Towards the end of June they got responses from 330 internet users; 64.8% were male, 14.2% in their twenties, 29.1% in their thirties, 34.8% in their forties, 17.9% in their fifties, and 3.9% in their sixties.

I’m not really sure why people feel such reluctance to using their credit card online, and the column makes no mention of the reasons either. Perhaps it is an issue of trust, or perhaps it is just a general sense of the internet being dangerous. I reacon that the net, SLL in particular, is safer than the average shop, and the danger of hacking web sites can result in data leaking from offline as well as online purchases.
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research on commercial email magazines. They interviewed by means of a private internet-based questionnaire 331 people working in private industry. 76.1% of the sample was male, 14.5% in their twenties, 45.9% in their thirties, 32.9% in their forties, 6.3% in their fifties, and just 0.3% (one person) in their sixties.

Many major companies with online presences produce these email magazines, although one drawback I find is that whilst subscribing is easy, unsubscribing can be a pain, as there is rarely a one-click solution; often one needs to log into an account, find the settings, then turn them off. I have had to redirect a few of them straight to the spam bin as I’ve been unable to find out how to turn them off!
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japan.internet.com published the results of a survey by JR Tokai Express Research into mobile information devices. On the last day of June and the first of July they interviewed by means of a private internet survey amongst their monitor group 330 people, 64.8% male. 10.0% were in their twenties, 30.6% in their thirties, 33.6% in their forties, 19.1% in their fifties, and 6.7% in their sixties. Note that this survey was looking at personal, not business, requirements.

I was suprisised that more people said that their ideal mobile environment would contain a spreadsheet editor rather than a scheduler, but perhaps this reflects the fact that many people already have sufficient mobile scheduling capability, be it either a pen and paper diary or a mobile phone’s function; most phones nowadays come with a rather functional scheduling application.
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