If you're running Firefox 1.5, this is the last update. Please upgrade to Firefox 2.0 if you have not done so already.
May 2007 Archives
I don't watch too much anime but I do enjoy 攻殻機動隊, the Ghost in the Shell series as well as the recent Appleseed (2004) movie.
Now Jean Snow tells us that the next "Appleseed Saga Ex Machina" is scheduled for later this year. I cannot wait!
UPDATE: Scott of TechJapan.com corrects me that these are not Flash.
Changwon Kim of Web 2.0 Asia points us to the fact that Google Korea's homepage now has 7 Flash-driven CSS image rollover "buttons" linking to popular Google services. I can see this being popular in Japan as well.
I don't like the fact that they are Flash animated, but it is interesting to see Google change their UI in Korea, where they are trailing Naver.
As the reviewer says, "If you're running a WordPress blog, the OWA plugin is a must-have if you care how much traffic your site receives and where it comes from. I use it in combination with Google Analytics, and really like having both tools to see as much as possible about my site visitors."
Disclaimer: the developer of Open Web Analytics is my best friend, but that should not stop you from running OWA if you are running Wordpress. Not only that, the founder of OWA ran a data mining startup (Primary Knowledge) in a past life, so you're getting a real expert on data mining who's developed an open source analytics platform for wordpress.
David Weinberger's new book, "Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder" is now available. The prologue and chapter 1 is on his website for you to peruse.
Full disclosure: I am proud to know David via Jerry Michalski.
UPDATE: Scott Rosenberg interviews David at Salon.
Politicians (not all of course) are corrupt all over the world.
Corrupt Japanese politicians seem to favor suicide as their last course of action.
What I just cannot understand is this logic: pretend you are a politician in Japan. You're in your 50s or 60s, married, kids, maybe even grandkids. I'm sure the corruption slope is a slippery one, but if it ends up with suicide (for whatever reason) then what's the use? A whole life spent in civil service, that family will be forever tainted by that suicide. What a waste.
UPDATE: Now there are 3 suicides interconnected. Matsuoka, Shinichi Yamazaki, and Yukihiro Uchino who Fukumimi writes about.
LEAD: Former exec linked to J-Green scandal falls to death
Matsuoka's reported suicide ｫ from the inside, looking in
Facing Inquiry, Japanese Official Commits Suicide - New York Times
Observing Japan: Matsuoka Toshikatsu, RIP
Japan's Agriculture Minister Offs Himself - Japan Probe
Observing Japan: "An indispensable man of talent for agriculture administration"
Matsuoka death shocks politicians
UPDATE 2:
Observing Japan: Whitewashing Matsuoka
Mutantfrog Travelogue - Reactions, Speculation on Matsuoka's Suicide
Liberal Japan - Toshikatsu Matsuoka commits suicide.
This news is interesting.
Google Korea plans to introduce an age-verification system to its search engine later this year that will restrict adult-themed searches to those 19 years of age and older, it said Thursday.
Users will be asked to verify their age when searching for any of about 700 words in Korean judged to be adult and supplied to the portal by the Korean government, said Lois Kim [cq], a spokeswoman for the company in Seoul.
Users will have to enter their name and national resident registration number, which will be checked against a database to verify the user-- or at least the person whose data has been entered-- is old enough.
The article does go on to say that all the other Korean portals already do this kind of age verification. I wonder if this age verification is based on language or location (i.e. if you search in Korea, you'll be prompted to verify your age, or if you are outside of Korea, you can search on adult terms without a prompt.)
Can you imagine Google trying this in the US?
Google Korea Restricts Search - Yahoo! News
UPDATE: Searchengineland had 5 questions about this new age-verification system answered by Google. Most interestingly, it only affects Google.co.kr. If a person in Korea accesses Google.com, they won't be prompted for the age verification? Seems like quite a nonsensical filter.
Searching For An Adult Topic? You'll Have To Prove Your Age To Google Korea
This is why Silicon Hutong is in my daily reading. He takes the news about Yang speaking at the Hua Yuan Science & Technology Association meeting (it was 2 years ago at this same event that Jack Ma and Jerry Yang discussed the $1 bil. Alibaba-Yahoo! China partnership) and properly breaks it down for all of us.
First, he [Yang] decided to sneak Yahoo! into China - take the stealth approach, as it were. That worked so well that Yahoo! was stomped by local players like Sina, Sohu, and Netease who did not feel compelled to fly low and avoid the radar.
Then, he got talked into having Yahoo! buy local search engine 3721 and turning over Yahoo! China's future to the control of 3721's mercurial founder. Eighteen months and over $100 million later, that imploded, and Yahoo!'s position in China had slid even further.
Finally, he handed the China business and $1 billion to Alibaba. That hasn't failed yet, but the jury is definitely still out. Yahoo! China has apparently fallen to a distant third in the search engine rankings behind Google and Baidu. Yahoo!'s Chinese landing page looks like a rip-off of Google's, so there is no pretense of competition with the portals anymore.
Any other executive with a similar track record would have been reassigned, if not fired, long ago.
And now Jerry wants Yahoo! China to be in the advertising exchange business.
Is anybody at Yahoo! the least bit concerned?
Silicon Hutong: When Jerry Yang Talks China, Run for the Doors.
Just a quick note to let everyone know that I'm slow replying to emails because I've caught a cold and am running slow. I went to the doctor on Friday and he reminded me that it was a year ago that I last saw him for a cold.
The fiasco around the ousting of JPGmag founders Derek & Heather could not have been handled more poorly by co-founder Paul Cloutier, who took the role of CEO when JPGmag took on VC funding. MetaFilter also has a great discussion on this topic.
Very interesting job for the right person.
Great overview by Matthew Haughey of MetaFilter: key tips for running large communities.
I don't trust this "news" source much, but this sadly does ring true... I'd like to see the original article in Maariv.
David Weinberger, whom I know via Jerry Michalski, was recently interviewed by Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo! about David's new book "Everything is Miscellaneous." David's blog about the book has some thoughts about the Yahoo! interview event which resonated with me:
After I’d gone on for a while, someone (sorry, I’m bad at names) asked what really motivated me. Very helpful question. I said that the Aristotelian assumptions, combined with the limitations of paper-based knowledge, lead to authority over knowledge being placed in the hands of a few. The few tend to be highly qualified and often selfless, but it still is a power regime. Although I didn’t say this last night, that’s why I am so enamored of the idea that fundamentally the Internet is ours. In fact, another way to say what the book is about would be: Everything Is Miscellaneous is about meaning becoming ours.
I haven't had the chance to read David's book yet (it's not our here in Japan) but I look forward to it. Yahoo! has the video of their conversation up here:
They're going to sell every single one they make. This bike will be THE bike to own in 2007.
Luckily they have a few stores in Japan too.
http://www.dintaifung.com.tw/eng/
self-explanatory
Philipp Lenssen has a fascinating interview with Aaron Swartz who's blog I've read for some time and was most recently a founder and developer of Reddit (which was sold to CondeNast, of all places.) I'll quote some of the pieces of the interview that resonated with me.
Why did you decline Google job offers of the past?
Well, I didn’t want to work at Google when I was at Stanford, I thought I should finish school. I didn’t want to work there when I was at Reddit, working at a startup was much more exciting. And now? Well, post-IPO, Google isn’t the same exciting place that it once was. None of the people I’ve spoken to at Google seem to have jobs that strike me as particularly appealing. Interesting, certainly, but not something I can really see spending my 9 to 5 doing for long periods of time.
...
Were you surprised when Google announced they enter China, with all the censorship compromises that brings?
Yes, I think it was quite disappointing. I wasn’t as surprised as many commentators, but I wasn’t very happy about it.
The old Google would have said “We don’t compromise on free speech” and started investing in software like Tor so that people in China could reach whatever web sites they pleased.
The fact that he would not answer the question about the text link ads on his blog was pretty telling too. I HATE text link ads. More than I hate banner ads. more than I hate search engine keyword ads. Text link ads are not real advertising- they're plain and simple SEO. I'll give Aaron the benefit of the doubt but I'd really like to see him defend his use of text link ads on his site. In my book they're SEO spam of the worst kind.
GigaOM has arranged to have a site for free invites into the Joost beta. If you haven't tried out Joost, please give it a go. You'll probably be surprised to hear that the technology that Joost is built on is the same platform that Firefox and Thunderbird are built on.
Here's what I like about Takashi Murakami: he has made significant efforts to support other Japanese artists (Aya Takano, Chiho Aoshima, Chinatsu Ban, etc. ) with the benefit of his own popularity.
What I don't like about Murakami is a much longer list.
At the core of things, I see Murakami as more of a marketer than as an artist, i.e. inauthentic because the basis of his work and popularity (that which is otaku culture) is not his own culture. Real Japanese otaku don't see Murakami as a peer who got famous, but more as an interloper who commandeered otaku cuture for Murakami's own benefit.
So I laugh at the recent NY Times profile of Murakami's newest NYC show at the Gagosian. The reviewer, Carol Vogel, was at least smart enough to cue in on a few unique aspects of otaku culture in her profile: "These days Mr. Murakami’s tentacles reach far and wide."
This part, where Murakami dons a kimono and does a tea ceremony in the gallery is not funny.
At Gagosian the ceremony began with a serving of neon-green spongecakes, in the center of which were two tiny egg yolks: something sweet for the palate, said Mr. Sen, 31, a descendant of the 16th-century tea master Sen no Rikyu. Then there was the elaborate preparation of the green tea, using a 400-year-old bamboo spoon to scoop the tea leaves out of an ancient wooden container. An antique iron kettle held the boiling water, while a modern bowl filled with boiling water was used to rinse out each of the 17th-century ceramic serving bowls that Mr. Murakami had brought from his home in Tokyo for the occasion.“I wanted to bring something spiritually and culturally Japanese to a wider audience,” Mr. Murakami said as a Japanese television crew filmed his every move. “This is only the second time in my whole life I’ve dressed up like this,” he added. “The first time was when I was at the tea master’s house.”
This part, about how Murakami is using tea ceremony to promote his new show, goes to the heart of what I don't like about Murakami. It's all façade and no substance; he himself reveals that it's only the second time in his life that he's worn a kimono. I've worn a kimono more often than Murakami has and I only moved to Japan 4 years ago.
Murakami's co-option of tea ceremony to market his "Japaneseness" outside of Japan really grates on me. People who really care about the art of tea ceremony (i.e. not the young Mr. Sen, even if he is descendant of a famous tea master) would not debase tea in order to help market Murakami's derivative art.
I mourn the fact that this marketer is the face of contemporary art in Japan. We should have better than Murakami. It's sad that the international art community can't see the king without his clothes. Must be that $300 million of Louis Vuitton/Murakami bags that blinds the eyes.
I've recently started using Dopplr for trips and travel.
If you're in the Dopplr beta and want to give me access to my trips (so I can do the same for you), my Dopplr account is below:
Not what Google would have you believe vis-a-vis their KDDI AU tie-up...
Google losing badly to Yahoo! Japan in mobile search » ä¸è« What Japan Thinks
Justin, an American who used to live in Japan and now is married to a Thai woman and is living in Thailand relates an aspect of Thai society which is hard for Americans to imagine.
Poor parents sometimes give their children away to people who they think can take care of them better. Of course, I was flabbergasted when I heard this. I mean, I guess you could kind of view it as adoption without an adoption agency, but then you have to remember that adoption agencies exist for a reason. We could be axe murderers for all her parents know! I mean, they really have no fucking idea who we are, and they are offering up their daughter? Yes, I can honestly say this is one cultural wall I have run smack into, and will have a hard time recovering from. This wall kicked my ass.
I've been inundated with comment spam again and have chosen to implement a challenge-response for any future comments. I hate having to do this but managing the spam comments recently was taking me a significant amount of time that I could not afford.
Please let me know if there are any problems- by leaving me a comment :) Seriously though, I appreciate the comments and I apologize for having to add this extra step.
Fleep.com has a new mix out - Temptation. Do not miss it if you love deep house.
Guilty pleasures. Some fine 80's cheese remixed.
80s Cheesy Mash – Hidden Persuaders
Being Nobody (Final confused mix) – Soundhog
Axel F v Mr Mister (Exorcism edit) – DJ Earlybird
Running without you – PeteyPauls
Jump to Heaven – Martinn
Call on Valerie - Mixamatosis
Thrillered in a Kalifornia Ride Situation – DJ John
Stay with you (Big Bad Baz mix) – Lemon Jelly
Girls just want to throw their hands in the air - Futuro
More than a feeling (Act of Dog’s minimally moulded mix) - Boston
Jump! In the name of Love (Van Halen v Supremes) – DJ Scmolli
Girls Jump (Xtina v Van Halen) – Go Home Productions
Dashdance (Run to me ) – Lionel Vinyl v Bryan Adams
Livin’ on a Prayer (Dropbass cheeeze mix) – Bon Jovi
Waiting for Insomnia (Faithless v Foreigner) – DJ Payroll
Dancing Queen machine – Gingersteve
Bigmouth Snaps Again – DJ Payroll
This Nation Needs you – Cuban Boys
