世論 What Japan Thinks

Well, it’s now been just about a month since I started this blog, so I think a short retrospective is in order. First, the good stuff:

• Registered with most of the main directories and search engines
• Even getting some hits from above
• Done a lot of interesting (to me anyway) research and translations
• Managed to average just about one post a day
• Got a reasonably slick authoring environment with HTML-Kit
• AdSense monetisation set up

Now the bad stuff:

• Lack of punters
• Lack of comments – one real one, one spam so far
• Google ranking pretty poor – even seron what japan thinks hits blog directories first
• One solitary AdSense click
• Blog Explosion has been a waste of time

To explore the bad stuff further, first let us consider Blog Explosion. On paper it sounds great, for every two blogs you surf, you get credit for one hit in return, basically. However, the hits are extremely poor quality, as everyone, me included, is just clicking through to get credits. Admittedly, I’ve found two blogs that are interesting, the first being Blurred Line Blog, and especially his ongoing experiment with buying credits for Blog Explosion and tracking the hits. It’s also refreshing to find a blog written by someone who understands the English language correctly. The second is Tom’s Astronomy Blog. I’m not much of a fan of the science, per se, but he has a great set of pictures from his telescope and elsewhere and writes up descriptions for them that very clearly express his love of the stars. Both would be feeds for my RSS Reader, if I had one!

Next, the lack of punters and comments. Well, I suppose it’s early days, so I can’t expect a healthy readership instantly, and I’ve not tried networking much at all. This problem ties in with the Blog Explosion experience above, I feel, as with Blog Explosion you need to spend thirty seconds surfing to get one viewer (assuming you assign all your credits to buying hits), who is probably only going to spend the minimal time on your page just so they can get their credit to spend on another pair of useless eyeballs. To get 30 visitors (my current daily average) I need to spend probably 20 minutes (allowing for overhead) surfing. But, if in that 20 minutes I instead search for a blog with a recent posting on a similar topic matter to mine – Google Blogs and Technorati are good places to look for candidates – and write a comment that either just has my top-level URL in the header or specifically links to one of my relevant stories, I should in theory get targeted traffic. I’ve only done this twice or thrice, mind you, and have had merely one or two hits in return, but if I can do twenty posts and once catch the blog owner’s eye, the chance of getting a trackback or even a blogroll entry increases, and a permanent link is worth it for getting that essential boost in the search engines.

I suppose all the other negative things are caused by the lack of punters, so I’ll just have to keep plugging away and see what happens. I genuinely believe that this blog will provide a useful database for someone, whether it just be settling Internet arguments about Japan, such as when discussing Japanese religiosity or lack thereof; or whether it be for more serious business reasons, such as trying to get a feel for Japanese public opinion on topics that perhaps rarely get translated. I really do feel I have some unique (within the context of the English language world) content here!

To conclude, one of my Technorati blog tags is public opinion. I am the solitary blog so tagged, and looking at the individual post tags, public opinion shows my own blog with five out of the latest ten entries (it would be more but Technorati is slow to update my blog, and I didn’t start tagging until recently), which must demonstrate something, probably about how ego-centric the average blogger is!

Doing some study at work on patents, trademarks and copyright issues in Japan in Japanese, I found out that for the results of opinion polls and the like, copyright law does not apply, except in the case where the words “Reproduction Prohibited” (Japanese: 禁転載) are present along with the data, therefore this blog does not infringe copyright on the surveys as far as I can determine. The write-up on the surveys is covered by copyright, especially when opinion or other human creativity is expressed, so I still need to find out if the concept of “Fair Use” is enshrined in Japanese law. My translations and reportage are copyright as they contain considerable creative effort (although it might not seem like it all the time) but they may be derivative works, depending on how literally I translate the stories. I should be able to get away with “Fair Use” (unlike manga and anime translator who also claim it) as I don’t use all the source material, and I believe I add value only with my comments or with the uncopyrightable raw data.

Of course, I am not a lawyer, Japanese or any other nationality, so please take my advice only with a rather generous pinch of salt, and remember how much you have paid for this advice.

– now in Google, but still no links to me to be found — got a strange hit from Yahoo! mail — need a better counter than SiteMeter — worked out how to write a macro in HTML-Kit, so can do tables faster — all other Blog Explosion users just perform click throughs, never read, just like me too — Google Blog Search returns rather poor results for the keyword “Japan” — translating is fun! — lots and lots of stats to translate, historical comparisons might be fun — trying HaloScan, but might bin their comments and stick with Blogger — goodnight all –

Had a hard day at the office today, so no translations. Sorry folks.

Now, some stuff about blogging – if you just want links, signing up for some of these blog collectives is a good way of doing it. I use Blog Explosion, amongst others, which seems a good way to force traffic to your site. It’s probably very low-quality eyeballs, but I’m just starting here, so any exposure is welcome.

Google has also picked me up indirectly, but not found my address directly yet. I have a short-term goal to get into the top page for a search on seron, and a longer-term goal for a different phrase, which I won’t publicise so as not to artifically get it pumped by any well-meaning reader. Once I get the second goal, I will seriously work on monetising this blog.

Back to BlogExplosion – browsing the links proves Sturgeon’s Law, I’m afraid! There’s been a couple of interesting and fully pages, but mostly… sigh!

I use HTML-Kit to edit this page. You can’t go wrong at the price, and although a little unwieldy – I wish tables were easier! – it does the business. Blogger’s own WYSIWYG editor doesn’t work properly on Opera, and anyway it’s good to save stuff off-line too just in case.

It’s quite frustrating, but at my workplace we have access to masses of surveys of our company’s products and that of our competitors too. Quite fascinating figures are contained within, but sadly company confidentiality prevents me from translating them for the benefit of my readers.

世論 (seron) is the Japanese word for public opinion. 世論調査 (seron chousa) is public opinion poll. “Seron” can also be spelt “yoron” in certain circumstances that I’m not absolutely clear on, but for the purposes of this web site “seron” it is! The web address is seronchousa, however, as seron was already reserved.

I started this web site as there is a definite lack of sites that collate Japanese public opinion… ack, that’s the sanitised version! The real reason is that I want to practice my Japanese to English translation skills, and that statistics and their interpretation interest me. Look up a Japanese news site like Japan Today and you’ll often see new public opinion polls (or just numbers seeming randomly plucked out of the air!) presented with zero analysis of what they mean. Usually the lack of analysis is down to the Kyodo News Agency just providing the most basic of stories, but even when one reads a printed newspaper with a longer, more detailed story there is no attempt made to analyse what the numbers really mean.

There was, for instance, a story at the start of this year (sorry, can’t find a link!) about how something like 50% of Japanese said they used child seats. In my totally unscientific experience, however, a figure closer to 5% would seem more believable, as most kids run around cars freely, as far as I can see. Why this huge discrepancy between what a casual observer might see and how people answered? No-one in the press,
as far as I could see, took this matter on. In this blog, in addition to the basic translation of the survey, I’ll add my own comment when appropriate.

A small note about the translation: as I am unaware of the exact legal status of translations of articles (direct translations of novels are copyright to the translator, but they are derivative works, so the translator cannot legally distribute without permission) I will try to avoid too literal a translation. Regardless of the law, plagiary is morally dishonest, regardless of whether or not imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Facts and figures cannot be copyrighted, I believe, so these are OK to reprint, however.

If you search Google for “Japan public opinion” currently the first hit is an interesting academic site collating various polls, but the latest survey is from 1999, it seems, so it’s quite a bit out of date. I hope I can make this site a popular destination for this search term and perhaps even a useful stopping-off point for those who need some numbers on Japan.

To finish, if you have a survey you would like translated (perhaps you saw a short unsatisfactory English article somewhere and would like to know what the original survey was), or have a pet subject you think I should investigate, drop me a message and I’ll see what I can do. I’ll try to satisfy small requests or fun requests relatively promptly. If you have a professional or other serious need for an accurate translation, be it public opinion related or not, drop me a message too and we’ll see what sort of business arrangement we can come to.