May 2005 Archives

The Wall Street Journal takes on the question of weblogs:

If you read press coverage about blogs, you might conclude that just about all Americans are reading a blog. But then you wouldn't have time to read the press coverage, because if surveys are to be believed, you're probably busy creating your own blog.

The numbers of the blogosphere range widely. Are there 10 million blogs, or 32 million? Do a quarter of online Americans really read blogs, as one oft-cited survey found? And why do rankings of the most popular blogs vary so much?

Measuring the Impact of Blogs Requires More Than Counting [online.wsj.com]

Jamie Monberg, one of my best friends from university, has a guest column at Media Inc.

Technology has crossed a critical threshold. Just as you don’t need to know HTML to create a website, you no longer need assembly code or binary math to approach tech development. The pieces are out there; we just need to put them together. Instead of viewing technology as something to design around, we should design with it, engaging technology not as a mechanic uses tools, but as an artist uses paint.

Designing Technology [media-inc.com]

Adam Greenfield, who last blogged in January, is back.

Technorati Japan (my employer) has finally launched our beta service. We have launched the keyword search, URL search, and the "Top News," "Top Books," "Top 100," rankings.

We still have many more features to launch in the coming weeks, but if you blog in Japanese, please give our service a try.

Technorati Japan

see also...

Joi Ito's Web: Technorati.jp beta launched

Todd Kreider makes some fun at the expense of METI.

India passes Japan...

....sometime early next year.


This is one of those rare events like a total solar eclipse. Although many 
of us (myself included) missed the last economic eclipse in 1995 when China 
overtook Japan, we still have plenty of time to set up tents, get out the 
binoculars, and look East as India eclipses Japan sometime next year.
I don't see any other heavily populated, fast growing economies on the 
horizon, so this may be it for a while.

Wasn't someone at METI watching the rear? Maybe Japan can stall this by 
churning out more cement.

(2003)

US $11 billion
China $6.5 billion
Japan $3.6 billion
India $3.0 billion....$3.3 billion in 2004

http://www.indexmundi.com/g/r.aspx?c=ja&v=65

NBR'S JAPAN FORUM (ECON) India passes Japan...

Hot damn, this mix (178 MB) is phenomenal!

::: Tom Middleton's Star Wars Special
::: 15/05/2005

The Sound Of The Cosmos Intro
Pete More - 'Asteroid' (White)
20th Century Fox Fanfare
DJ Zinc - 'New Hope 137' (Bingo Beats)
The Jedi Knights - 'Air Drums From Outer Bongolia' (ULP)
Switch - 'Abitpatchy' (CDR)
Sista Widey - 'Inspecta' [Jimpster Mix] (Freerange)
Chemical Brothers - 'Galvanise' [Half-Arsed Beats edit] (White)
Alter Ego vs Stanton Warriors - 'Rocker' (CDR)
Azzido Da Bass - 'Doomsnight' (Club Tools)
Mr Oizo - 'Flat Beat' (F Comm)
Hexstatic - 'Distorted Minds' [Zero DB Mix] (Ninjatune)
Link and E621 - 'Antacid' [Jedi Knights Mix] (White)
DJ Phully - 'Jedi's Disco' (Lovefunk Exclusive)
LCD Soundsystem - 'Disco Infiltrator' (DFA)
John Williams - 'Cantina' (White)
Jedi Knights - 'Dance Of The Naughty Knights' (ULP)
Shawn Lee - 'Feel The Force' (White)
Warp 9 - 'Light Years Away' [Exactshit Mix] (Prism)
Key-matic - 'Breakin In Space' (Radar)
Bjorn Elevators - 'Make That Go' (CDR)
Ennio Moricone - 'Alla Serenita' [Hakan Lidbo Cosmos Re-Edit] (Compost)
Bebel Gilberto - 'Simplesementes' [Tom Middleton Cosmos Club Vox] (Crammed Discs)
Amerie - 'One Thing' [Radio Slave Mix] (CDR)
Kerri Chandler - 'Bar-A-Thym' (Nite Grooves)
DJ Technic - 'Gabryelle' (Defected)
Daft Punk - 'Technologic' (Virgin)
Delano Smith - 'The DJ' [Jimpster Mix] (CDR)
Nu RhythMix - 'Origins' [Neo funk Mix] (White)
Playgroup Feat KC Flight - 'Front 2 Back' (Defected)
Shur-i-kan - 'I Want It' (CDR)
Random Factor feat Georg Levin - 'Move On' [Jimpsters House Dub] (20-20)
Joey Negro - 'Scattering Stars' (ZR)
Blaze feat. Barbara Tucker - 'Most Precious Love' [Inst] (Defected)
DB vs Tim Paris - 'Future Now' [Paris - Lawson Edit] (20-20)
Mylo vs Cosmos - 'Rikki Take The Pressure' (CDR)
DJ Phully - 'Rouge Injun' (Lovefunk)
Milton Jackson - 'M' (White)
Soul Mekanik - 'Robots' (RIP)
Silicone Soul - 'The Poisoner's Diary' [Ewan Pearson Inst] (Soma)
Hardfloor - 'Da Revival' (White)
Daft Punk - 'Robot Rock' [Soulwax Mix] (Virgin)
Andre Kraml - 'Safari' [James Holden Mix] (Crosstown Rebels)
Gwen Stefani - 'What you Waitin For' [Thin White Duke Dub] (Interscope)
Pitchblack - 'Freefall' [Alucidnation house dub/half speed dub edit] (Pitch Black)
Tomita - 'Star Wars Theme' (RCA) Carl Sagan - 'The Cosmos Is All It Is' (White)
Vangelis - 'Heaven and Hell 3rd Movement' (White)

Thefacebook.com sounds like an Internet bubble company:

• advertising supported (not that it bad on it's own but...)
• rapid growth
• founders leaving college (Harvard no less)
• big VC funding early on

The three friends designed their site, Mr. Zuckerberg said, "in such a way that if it was good, it could be introduced at other schools." It was an instant hit, and within one month Columbia, Stanford and Yale students could log on to sites at their schools. By June 2004, sites were available for about 30 campuses and 150,000 students were registered.

Student's Start-Up Draws Attention and $13 Million - New York Times [nytimes.com]

IT Media, a popular IT news site here in Japan, has a long article profiling a young woman company president. I haven't read the whole thing but the main point of the article is that she looks like a Shibuya Gyaru but is actually a company president. (Makes me think of some psychedelic Japanese SuperFriends show where you have all these stereotypes like SuperGyaru, SuperOyaji, SuperKyouikumama...ok need coffee.)

「Blogがすべてだった」——20歳ガングロ社長の“ギャル革命” [itmedia.co.jp]

★☆ギャルの革命☆★ [the blog in question- only 5 months old]

My Japanese blogger friends tell me that they don't take this girl seriously and she's merely using a weblog to promote herself and her company. But that's sort of what blogs are great for, so I don't see the problem.

I do think it's strange that IT Media did a profile on her, however. It seems to cross the line of news/PR, but that's par for the course in Japanese news. The line between PR and news is very grey here.

If you thought that del.icio.us was a little slow recently, try it again. Joshua's recently expanded the hardware to support the service and it should be much more speedy.

delicious servers - a photoset on Flickr

BusinessWeek has an article on the private equity market in Japan. Basically the article says that there is too much money chasing too few deals.

Plus, Japanese government intervention means an uneven playing field for the foreign PE firms who would like to take over a Japanese company.

It turns out that it's not so easy to pull off a big-ticket buyout in Corporate Japan. So far this year the flow of fresh deals has slowed -- just 39, vs. 52 a year ago, says Thomson Financial. And the value of private-equity buyouts is at $1.4 billion, vs. $2.1 billion this time last year. At that rate, the market will be hard-pressed to top the $7.5 billion rung up last year, or even the $6 billion in 2003. "All the signs are that there's too much money chasing too few deals," says C.J. Wilson, founder of Global Alliance Ltd., an M&A investment advisory firm.

Anyone in private equity in Japan have any thoughts on this? Anonymous comments are fine (just make up a name/email.)

Japan: Let's Not Make A Deal [businessweek.com]

On May 4th, more than $1B in Google insider shares was sold.

Google hasn't made even close to $1B in revenue income.

I wonder who Yamazaki Shinobu and Sato Yasuo are? The two Japanese people on the list of Google insider share sellers do not have a market value on the number of shares sold. Hrm.

Quote.com: Insider NASDAQ:GOOG

I've been so busy with the new job and life in general that I haven't made time to buy any music in a while. A few new purchases:

- Various Artists, Sounds of OM Vol. 5
- Various Artists, Buzzin' Fly Vol. 2
- Jazztronik "Nu Balance"

[ITM] Various Artists - Sounds of Om Vol 5, Mixed by DJ Fluid

Buzzin Fly 2 - Ben Watt

Splendid Magazine reviews Various Artists: Buzzin' Fly Vol. 2

[ITM] Various Artists - Buzzin Fly Vol 2, Compiled & Mixed by Ben Watt

Wooooo!

Jeremy Wagstaff of the WSJ Asia, profiles Tokyoartbeat!!! I can't offer you a link to the article because it's behind a subscription wall, but I've received permission to post the section on TAB.

Loose Connections

The Challenge Of Becoming the Main Event

Event Web sites like EVDB.com are dealing with a slightly different kind of scheduling issue than a family or office calendar. These sites cover public events, drawing traffic from people who want to go out and check out an art gallery, for example. But the challenges are similar: Making an attractive interface, getting the data to the people when they need it, and, most important for these kind of Web sites, putting enough information in there to make the site worth visiting.

Several event sites have had trouble getting off the ground because of the challenges. Upcoming.org, for example, is still struggling to reach critical mass. But one success story hints at a couple of approaches that may work: Not worrying too much about clever technology, and not trying to cover too large an area. Two young Frenchmen living in Tokyo, who got tired of not being able to find out what was going on, last year set up an events Web site called Tokyo Art Beat (tokyoartbeat.com). Instead of spending a lot of time focusing on the technology, Olivier Thereaux and Paul Baron focused on the information, gathering a team of 20 volunteers to add as many events as they could before launching last October. It might not be the flashiest of Web sites, but it's well organized and comprehensive. And with two million page views last month, not too shabby for a volunteer Web site focusing on only one city. "Without judging other projects, we're thinking in terms of community and service, not so much in terms of a technology showcase," says Mr. Thereaux. Hear, hear.

Setting Your Online Agenda, May 20, 2005 (Asia WSJ)

Congrats to Peter for a job well done! :)

AutoBlogger.net

Looks like we'll see a Japanese version of Yahoo!360 in the not-too-distant future.

Paul Brody, director of community products at Yahoo... tells IDG that 360 will become widely available in the next few weeks. Also, "localized" versions of Yahoo 360 in some European and Asian countries are coming soon.

That's going to eat into Mixi and Gree a lot, although Mixi has a great head start and a lot of momentum a la myspace in the US. Anyone have any numbers on Mixi?

I've got an account on Yahoo!360, so if anyone wants an invite, just leave a comment or email me at gen at kanai dot net.

New Services Coming to Yahoo 360; Localized Versions of 360 Planned

Adrian Holovaty has created a very interesting website using publicly available information on crime in Chicago by putting data released from the Chicago Police Department onto maps with the Google Maps API.

This is a very useful useage of the Google Maps API. If I was from Chicago, I'd find this site very alarming and useful at the same time.

The site also has free RSS feeds for every police beat and every city block in Chicago. So you can monitor your workplace, your children's school, your home, etc. Data is a week old due to processing delays at the police department, but just imagine how useful this will be.

Chicago crime database | chicagocrime.org

I may try to attend a day or two...

Broadband World Forum Asia 2005

Clay Shirky's newest piece on categories, links, and tags. Highly recommended. Great writing!

It comes down ultimately to a question of philosophy. Does the world make sense or do we make sense of the world? If you believe the world makes sense, then anyone who tries to make sense of the world differently than you is presenting you with a situation that needs to be reconciled formally, because if you get it wrong, you're getting it wrong about the real world.

If, on the other hand, you believe that we make sense of the world, if we are, from a bunch of different points of view, applying some kind of sense to the world, then you don't privilege one top level of sense-making over the other. What you do instead is you try to find ways that the individual sense-making can roll up to something which is of value in aggregate, but you do it without an ontological goal. You do it without a goal of explicitly getting to or even closely matching some theoretically perfect view of the world.

Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags

Kozoru.com: Next-gen search?

Why are non-Japanese people fascinated with Japanese nouns? I don't get it. Is it more of an issue that English-language nouns are all taken? Why not Chinese? Or Arabic? Why Japanese?

The Observer Food Monthly has a list of "The top 50 things every foodie should do."

Number 12 on the list of 50:

12) Slurp udon noodles in Takamatsu

Takamatsu, in the prefecture of Kagawa, on the island of Shikoku, to the south of Japan is to noodle lovers what Mecca is to Muslims. According to Terry Durack, restaurant critic and author of Hunger, in this one little town, 300 noodle restaurants all serve up bowls of big thick white, gloopy udon noodles. He suggests you look for hand-kneaded udon, and tells us not to worry about making a noise as we eat. You're supposed to slurp.

This I did last month. It was very, very good :)

The top 50 things every foodie should do [guardian.co.uk]

At the WWW2005 conference (which I could not attend as I was in SF), there was a Workshop on the Weblog Ecosystem.

Related links:
- the RSS feed for the 2005 workshop
- the papers for the 2005 workshop
- the schedule for the 2005 workshop
- the schedule for the 2004 workshop

The WWW2005 conference was held in Chiba, Japan this year. Here's the link to Tim Berners-Lee's keynote.

New Murakami short story in The New Yorker...

The New Yorker: WHERE I’M LIKELY TO FIND IT

Salon.com has just launched a new service where they are tracking their own stories in the blogosphere with Technorati.com.

Salon.com Blog Roundup

Joshua's launched a blog for del.icio.us users :)

del.icio.us

There's a new extension for Firefox that is quickly becoming interesting. It essentially allows users to add functionality to other people's websites via DHTML.

Very interesting....

Nivi : Greasemonkey will blow up business models (as well as your mind)

I enjoyed this commentary on being half-Japanese by Ai Uchida.

She touches upon the fact that half-Japanese people have a lot in common with kikoushijou (Japanese children who lived overseas as children) as well as Japanese who have lived overseas for many years (not necessarily as children.)

I also like the fact that she differentiates bi-lingual with bi-cultural. That is an important differentiation that is often mixed together.

All of us grew up understanding by instinct — or, when we were children, by simply accepting — the rules of two or more cultures that often clashed. We're the ones who empathize with the tension that Japanese feel when a foreigner does something unexpected or socially unacceptable. We are also the ones who can justify why the foreigner behaved that way.

And here I return to the reason why a bilingual person cannot be confused with a multicultural person: It is very difficult to study a foreign culture with the aim of assimilating into it. Culture is an intricately and illogically arranged web of delicate ideas and traditions. There are simply things you don't "get" unless you were there when the web was woven around you.

How the other 'hafu' lives [japantoday.com]

This is seriously messed up...

JR West says some staff went bowling despite serious accident

SF Gate article on "Asian" blogs. Not sure what makes these "Asian" per se... other than they are written by people in Asia....

ASIAN POP: Blogging Asia