世論 What Japan Thinks

Here’s a topic I haven’t seen a survey on for a while – perhaps it is no longer the next big thing? To find out if that is the case or not, japan.internet.com reported on a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research Inc on the topic of podcasting.

Demographics

On the 31st of August 2007 330 members of JR Tokai Express Research’s online monitor pool employed in either public service or private enterprises completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 83.3% of the group was male, 15.5% in their twenties, 37.3% in their thirties, 35.8% in their forties, 9.7% in their fifties, and 1.8% in their sixties.

The best thing about these podcast surveys is that it gives me an excuse to plug my favourite podcast, indeed the only podcast I listen to, Transpacific Radio, for the most detailed English news you can get on the Japanese worlds of politics, business, and occasionally even Duran Duran.

As I just listen to the one podcast, I don’t use any aggregator, I just directly download from TPR’s RSS feed for playback in Windows Media Player – I dislike using iPods.
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It’s a wee while since I’ve done a news round-up, so here goes.

First, there’s a rather new site, Trans-Pacific Radio, that does mostly politics-related stories on Japan and East Asia, often covering the news that other services either don’t translate or just scratch the surface of. They’ve got both a blog and regular podcasts (or netcasts, if you prefer), which I must admit I’ve not listened to yet, so please pay them a visit.

Talking of netcasts, now my new phone has a built-in audio player, what I’d really love to find is an RSS feed to SD Audio converter utility, so I could automatically add the casts to my mini SD card for listening to on the way to work. Anyone know of such a beast? Also, does anyone recommend a good tool to downsample video to mobile phone size, or to strip off the audio track?

Talking of mobile phones, I managed to view this blog, including the graphs all nicely scaled down, on my Panasonic P702iD, but when I tried adding a comment, Spam Karma crashed (the only problem I’ve ever had with this essential comment spam elimination tool for all bloggers) when trying to do the Captcha. The comment was safely quarantined, however, and could have been recovered if necessary.

Finally, I think I’ve got a touch of the flu coming on, so if I miss a couple of days over the weekend, you know what’s wrong with me.

japan.internet.com today published the results of a survey by JR Tokai Express Research into podcasting. They interviewed 331 people from their monitor pool, 87.6% male, employed in private or public enterprises. 7.3% were in their twenties, 39.9% in their thirties, 36.3% in their forties, 13.9% in their fifties, and 2.7% in their sixties.

I would be in the ex-users category, myself; even though this blog has been featured on three podcasts, the latest of them being Japundit’s podcast, Japan Talk, I have to admit I’ve not listened to the last two, and I in fact ditched my Sony hard disk player recently, but Panasonic’s recent announcement of their SD800N digital audio player with noise-cancelling headphones I could perhaps be persuaded to try again.
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of a survey by goo Research into podcasting. Over three days at the end of July they interviewed 1,046 members of their internet monitor group. 55.2% of the respondents were female, 23.3% were in their twenties, 39.0% in their thirties, 26.0% in their forties, and 11.7% in their fifties.

It seems to me that podcasting has been replaced by YouTube as the in-vogue buzzword. The last podcast I downloaded (no link as I wouldn’t want to subject you to it too) was a personal “audio postcard from Japan”-kind of recording, but oh dear! Never again will I go near that style of podcast – the lack of a usable fast-forward that duplicates aurally the visual scanning of headlines sapped up all my enthusiasm for the medium and the whiny gaijin content turned me right off the person.
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MyVoice conducted a survey into the use of MP3 players, especially in relation to Podcasting amongst 15,525 members (60% female) of their MyVoice community at the start of November.

I’m not much of a Podcast fan myself (although I have an idea for one for here…) nor a portable player owner, so I have never got into the whole idea at all, so I suppose I’m glad to see that four in five are in some degree of ignorance of the whole subject, and, barely four in one hundred have actually listened to one! Comparing the figures for Japan with those for other countries may be an interesting line of research, however, which I should do sometime soon. In fact, I am thinking of writing a regular column on survey analysis, so watch this space to see what develops.
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In another self-selecting survey reported by ITMedia, Podcasting Juice discovers that a lot of its users want to become Podcasters. I don’t really get the whole Podcasting business, or even portable music players myself. I’d much rather read a book or just actively stare into space rather than lose myself in my own little world.

From 7th July to 14th August, Podcasting Juice got 3995 replies to its survey, 81% male, 19% female.

Q: Do you want to create a Podcast?

I already have	1.5%
I want to	38.1%
Don’t know	32.2%
Not interested	27.6%
No answer	0.7%

Ahh, it’s getting late – I’ll finish the translation tomorrow!