世論 What Japan Thinks

First, Deas over at Rocking in Hakata has an epic edition of the Japan Blog Matsuri, with a pretty massive set of 26 entries to the Foreigh Food Matsuri. Enjoy!

Second, I’ve signed up for Google Friends Connect for some reason:

Feel free to add yourself to the list and… I’m not really sure what happens after the and, but there must be some good reason why everyone at JapanSoc.org is signing up!

One of my blogging New Year Resolutions is to network more – indeed just network full stop – so one way is to give something to the community of Japanese bloggers that doesn’t quite exist yet, despite some action towards that goal.

Some of you might have heard of JapanSoc, a digg-like social bookmarking thingie for Japan-related news stories, but it seems to be suffering from a lack of readers. So, in order to spread awareness of its existence and to increase the number of stories posted and therefore voted on and clicked-through to, I’ve written a small FeedBurner FeedFlare that puts a “JapanSoc It!” button at the bottom of each post.

If you as a blog publisher want to use it, sign up to both FeedBurner and JapanSoc if you haven’t already done so, then from your feed’s FeedBurner menu select the Optimize tab along the top, then the FeedFlare option on the left. Look for the edit field with the “Add New Flare” button beside it, and type into the box and press the button. Now, everyone who reads your feed will have the opportunity to submit your stories to JapanSoc.

This is an unofficial add-in and I’ve only previously hinted to Nick that I was doing something for his site! If you want to know why you should use it, Nick posted today on boosting traffic with JapanSoc. Oh, and perhaps Nick might like to make this suggested change to the submit.php page to handle resubmissions, or even do something like this.

If you as an RSS feed consumer want to use it, sign up to JapanSoc and whenever you see the “JapanSoc It!” button on a good story (like this one?) in your RSS reader, just press the button and submit it.

If you don’t use an RSS reader, try Google Reader for size.

Note that another similar site, TokyoGraph Link, doesn’t seem to support automation, so I cannot provide a widget for that.