In connection with a “Blog Establishment” cover feature piece, New York Magazine has assembled a list of the 50 most linked-to blogs and mapped their connections in one of those pretty graphics (pdf here). What’s interesting are the number of Asian sites listed in among the 50, sites the magazine has to admit “don’t have any links from the others shown here,” which takes more than a slight bite out of their “blog establishment” angle.

Particularly interesting to me was this: out of nine blogs listed as “Japanese”, only three of them are in fact Japanese; the other six are actually Chinese. (There are a further six “Chinese” or “in Chinese” blogs listed — all correctly so). Of course this is just sloppiness on the magazine’s part, but it makes you wonder how much the magazine cares about these “Asian” blogs (a full 17 out of the 50 listed).

No doubt because they never bothered to find anyone who could read or understand them, most of these blogs are simply tagged “in Japanese” or “in Chinese.” But perhaps more troubling, there’s no acknowledgement of their place vis-a-vis this so-called “blog establishment.” In the magazine’s cover story, there isn’t a single mention of these or any Asian bloggers, perpetuating their own “A-list” bias as it were (“A” in this case most definitely not standing for Asia). They can crash the Top 50 party based on their Technorati data, but the A-list (or B- and C-listers for that matter) won’t even acknowlege their existence.

It could also be that many of the “foreign” blogs in this Top 50 (12 altogether) are hosted on MSN’s My Space blogging platform, which the article refers to, not surprisingly, as a “rather lame network of blog sites.” Granted these “community” sites tend to link and comment with each other, thereby pushing up their “linked to” status, but shouldn’t this phenomenon be part of the story, rather than relegated to the asterisked margins of lameness?

The blog’s tagline said something about “the love of my life moved blindly to Japan” and I was intrigued, so I went to the beginning to find out how this came to pass. In the end, it’s still something of a mystery, how this woman — a Brit named Maria who has lived in Japan for 13 years, lives in Aichi-ken somewhere, owns a sailboat she named Jack Daniels, has false teeth, teaches English at the cushiest job in Japan (it seems), and who just a few short months ago was pining away about whether she would ever find Mr. Right — ends up falling in love with an Italian living in Namibia that she’s never met before and declaring that she and he will spend the rest of their life together. All I know is that around November 18th of last year he first (obliquely) pops up in the blog, and two months later he’s here in Japan to be with her. Phew! It does leave one a bit breathless, doesn’t it?

She has only had the blog going since October, but this woman is a posting fiend, with 5 or 6 entries, daily! As she writes,

It may seem like I am addicted to blogging. However, I feel the need to defend myself. As I am a fast typist, it doth not take me that long to throw down some words. Typing also keeps my mind off things. As I write this, I am trying to avoid looking at the woman who is sitting opposite me. She is devouring her lunchbox with the ferocity of somebody who has just returned from 40 days and 40 nights in the UK. This woman absolutely loves speaking with her mouth full of food. When her gob is empty, she is quiet. But as soon as she puts a boiled knob of broccoli in her mouth, she starts talking.

The writing is by turns poetic and prosaic, with healthy doses of self-deprecation. While the tone is light for the most part, these are not the frivilous musings of some JET-ster reveling in a Japan-is-so-weird haze or a honeymoon-is-over ex-pat complaining about how fucked up the country is. I found her entry on Shosei Koda, the shamefully all but forgotten young Japanese man taken hostage in Iraq last October and subsequently beheaded, particularly heartfelt:

Dearest Shosei-kun. I knew you. You were every 24 year old male student that I’ve met in my 13 years in Japan. I knew what kind of bike you rode to junior and senior high school. I knew where you went after school. I knew what colour cell phone you had. I knew that you dyed your hair. I knew that you ate onigiris.[...] I’m pretty hardened to the death that humans throw at each other.I think the world is populated by an ever-increasing bunch of idiots. But you, Shosei-kun, your death is making me cry. I can’t stop thinking about you. This morning at the train station, I burst into tears thinking about everything that you had lost. Very few people know what Japan is about. They laugh at the Japanese. They talk about the tours they take. About their affection for cameras. About their goofy teeth. They know nothing.

As of this writing, Maria’s dream lover — Francesco — has been in Japan a week (consequently, her blog output has dropped to a measly 2 entries per day) and there seems to be no sign of a letup in their mutual head-over-heels love for each other. (Even coffee enemas don’t seem to drive any wedge between them.) Though the cynic in me can’t help but wonder if at some point we’ll get the “it was all a hoax” post, the latent romantic has been utterly captivated by this only-in-Hollywood story. As she writes, “What a love story! How smooth is has all been. How perfect. How true. For it all to have finally happened is surely the stuff that is usually only created in movies.” I have no idea where they are going from here, to Namibia, to sail around the world, but this is one romance page-turner I won’t be putting down anytime soon.

From Tuesday’s Yomiuri Shinbun IT section comes an article about a project that seems to have so far escaped the radar of non-Japanese web watchers (at least in so far as a Google search turns up):

LifeSlice.net

LifeSlice, which proudly proclaims itself as “first true blog” and features a great logo fashioned out of the word “blog,” is from what I can tell a site aggregating moblogs created with the same type of camera and blogging software. It’s run by the LifeSliceLab, a group with about 10 members, and kosby.com, the home page of which indicates it’s an “Incubation & Investment Company.”

As best as I can garner with my sorry Japanese — and with Naoko recently having resigned her post as Minister of Translation — the folks who are creating these moblogs (presumably just the members of the “lab” at this point) are using a low-res digital camera which automatically takes a picture at predetermined intervals (say, every 5 minutes). Take a look at this representative page from user Takanashi, of yesterday’s blog (be patient, these pages take a while to load), and you can see better what I’m referring to. If you click on the various links at the upper left of this page, you can display the images in varying ways.

The camera device is a Mach Power SVX produced by NHJ Limited, a company specializing in cheap, small, and lightweight digital still and video cameras. It features 300,000 pixel resolution (the same found in many camera phones, such as mine), a self-timer function which is what the Lab is apparently rigging to act as an intervalometer (this function may be built into the camera, not sure), and is able to function as a web camera, which is no doubt being used by LifeSlice to get the camera to act as a moblogging device. At present, for the setup to work, the camera has to be tethered to a computer or laptop, though it seems that the collective is working on an original camera which won’t need to be connected by cable to a computer.

The “What’s LifeSlice?” link isn’t working, but this page and others linked from there attempt to explain the project, if you can read Japanese. From what I can determine from those pages as well as the Yomiuri article, the project was started in May of this year, and already they have won some awards (from whom?), including one for a “life slice calendar” which apparently featured 8000 pages of LifeSlice images taken by a salaryman wearing the camera for 3 months.

Yet another flash in the pan techie project or something that’s got legs? Yet another step forward to the ubiquity of computing or another nail in serendipity‘s coffin? Who knows? But LifeSlice seems like something more folks should know about.

Related to this, Ken Loo, who maintains blogs in both English and Japanese, recently wrote an interesting piece further exploring whether or not blogging is becoming popular in Japan. [Update (July 29, 2003): Ken has re-done his English blog and this article is no longer available.] Furthermore, Ken writes about how a whole community of web diarists or “text site” keepers that existed in Japan before weblog software applications like Movable Type became available here has resented the way that their community has been usurped, so to speak. I don’t know the ins and outs of it, though the whole thing strikes me as a bit childish (kind of a music fan bragging about how he saw so and so back in the day, in a small club, before anyone knew who they were, etc.). At any rate, JBA (Japan Blogging Association), which was sort of a list of mostly Movable Type blogs, has closed (there’s an ominous looking — but unreadable to me — message at the site), apparently a casualty of this so-called burogu soudou (“blog war”).

I forgot my phone at home when going to work yesterday afternoon. In over a year of cellphone ownership, this was the first time I’ve done that. And you know what, as much as I hate to admit it, I felt terribly naked. That phone has become, aside from a tool with which I can instantaneously speak to the world (ie. “moblogging”), my combination worry-bead, rabbits foot, and security blanket. I’ve long since taken to absent-mindedly opening it up to check for new messages, in the same way that before I would have looked at my watch to check the time, even if I had checked it a minute before. One just needs sometimes some thing with which to ease the self-conscious idle waiting one does when commuting.

When I was coming home, I felt an unease at not being able to send my customary, always the same “I’m coming home. I love you and Kaika” message to my wife. Naoko expressed the same unease later when we talked about it, that without this ritualized piece of communication, something just seemed amiss, not quite right.

It’s quite funny that this would happen on the eve of the First International Moblogging Conference to be held later today in Tokyo. In advance of the conference, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about moblogging, and cellphones, and the effect it has had on my life. With that in mind, I’m going to jot down some random thoughts on moblogging here. This will be written out very quickly as it’s late and I need to go to bed.

Although my moblogging has picked up a bit this week, no doubt because otherwise it would be embarrassing to show up at the conference not having moblogged in 2 weeks, in reality I’m less enthused about it than when I first started doing it. Part of this is just my natural tendency to get all excited about some new toy or functionality, use the hell out of it for the first couple or weeks or so, and then burn out. I’ve burned out on the thrill of having a camera phone, and to some extent I’ve burned out on instantaneously posting pictures and thoughts to the web, eg. moblogging.

But burn-out isn’t the only reason. In fact, if my usual behavioral patterns hold true for moblogging, my enthusiam will ebb and flow naturally. Some other considerations are at play, all of them plebianly practical:

Expense — While sending email with one’s cellphone is very cheap, adding an image or two to that email isn’t necessarily, and the costs start to add up. Cellphone charges in Japan are based on packet-size, or packet-transfer. I knew what I was in for, but getting that first bill was still a bit of a reality-check. (Part of the problem was that I was also emailing myself all my pics and movies I was taking with the phone, which I’ve since stopped, as I now have a cable with which to transfer them cost-free to my desktop.) Throw in GPS, or “movie mail,” and you can start to imagine how costly it can be for someone with a family and other responsibilities/priorities.

Anti-social — Moblogging is for the most part solitary, and it takes time to moblog, time that needs to be carved out of the time one might be spent with others, with friends, loved ones. I feel I can really only moblog when I’m alone, and those times when I’ve done it in the presence of others I found extremely unsatisfying. If I’m moblogging in the presence of my wife, that’s time I’m not spending talking with her. If I moblog when I’m with Kaika, that’s time I’m not talking to him, playing with him, getting him to know his father.

Another thought….

One of the things that has bothered me, well before I ever began to actually moblog, was this implication that somehow moblogging meant posting a picture from a cellphone, and maybe text. The first moblog I ever saw, Joi Ito’s, featured entries with a photo and a title, and that was all. Nothing wrong with it, it was (still is!) compelling. And I admit that even when I first moblogged, back in January, using wapblogger, I felt I was missing something.

But there is something that bothers me about this primacy of the image, and I think it relates to concepts of truth and authenticity that I like to question from time to time. There seems to be this idea, not just among mobloggers but among society in general, that if a thought or statement or report isn’t accompanied by some visual representation, it is somehow less true or valid.

Take the embedded reporters in Iraq and the coverage from the major TV networks. More often than not, the images that were beamed back from Iraq to accompany the reporters’ stories were artifacted, digitized, highly abstract visual accompaniments. They were, for all intents and purposes, worthless in terms of communicating information, of news, or even propaganda. Yet they were shown night after night. Why? Because they symbolized a kind of truth, a visual statement that said “we’re in Iraq right now covering this war.” (Let’s leave aside for now the issue of what these embedded reporters were actually reporting on, eg. what the Pentagon wanted them to). Moblogging with photos, on a much lower scale and with different motivations and impulses at play, tends to play into this idea that image is king.

You know, Kevin, the developer of Moblogging for Other People (MFOP), and now MFOP2, the free program than enables me and many others to post to our blogs via our phone, doesn’t own a cellphone himself. It’s one of those great storylines of moblogging that’s almost too good to be true. But then I was remembering a comment Kevin once made to an entry here, where he talking about how he sometimes made sketches while on the train. The other night, ruminating about moblogging on the train as I’m wont to do, it occurred to me that in a way, I’m also a sketch artist, or that, in moblogging, I’d rather be sketch artist than a photographer. These are thoughts I would like to develop further.

Speaking of Kevin, earlier this week he asked me about my process when moblogging. Perhaps others will find this of interest. (click the link below to see my reply to him)

You asked about my process, I almost always take a pic, write something about it, and then send it off. Once in a while, I can’t finish the post and I save it in my outbox, and maybe send it later (though when I do this, I often find that I don’t send it at all– all the “unsent” email in my outbox are moblog posts I never ended up sending). It’s definitely about the moment for me, or at least an “extended moment”. For some reason, if I take a pic one day and were to write about it and post it on another, it wouldn’t seem “true” to me — i figure if i’m going to do that, i should just write about it on my regular blog. I have kind of a weird hang-up about keeping true to the “moblog” aesthetic, or at least the one I’ve carved up for myself, to the point that if, for example, I start
a post on the way home but don’t finish it, rather than starting over on the computer (eg. sending the image and then going to MT on desktop to add the
text), I continue to type on the phone, and send it. I’m weird!

It does take a long time to write, especially as I’m not the fastest writer (pretty good speed actually typing, either on a keyboard or with my thumb on the phone keypad), and tend to fret too much over every word, and one of the reasons my moblog has “dropped off” considerably is that sometimes I just can’t be bothered, or I know that I don’t have enough time within which to write something quality, or I’m in a different zone (lately I’ve been interested in using
train ads to enhance my Japanese study, for example). And if I’m with my wife, like I was yesterday, then I find it very distracting, and I’m sure she doesn’t
enjoy it either, and so I usually don’t post (or wait till she runs off to the bathroom).

about taking pics and posting, i think actually I haven’t become “used to” the idea yet, in other words if I see something that interests me, there’s a delayed reaction before I say to myself (sometimes too late), “oh, that’d make a good moblog post”. I also find myself wanting to write something “from the road”, but I don’t because I think that folks expect to have moblog texts annotated by an image, and all that’s around me are passengers feet on a train.

at this point, I started to talk about blogging and images in a similar vein to what I wrote above.

Surely more thoughts will come after the conference.

In my previous update in this vein, I made reference to the “Other Personal Views from Japan” link list on the right hand side of this site as an “expat in Japan” list. This was laziness on my part, an attempt to add a new spin to the “here we go again” nature of these posts. While the list is expat-dominated (that is to say, blogs by foreigners living in Japan), it isn’t exclusively. I appreciate being called on this by Cooool! Japan, in a humorous way.

So, without further ado, here are sites that have been added to said blogroll in the last week or so:

AMAI
Andrew and Kathleen
brightblack
Cooool! Japan
EFL in Japan
Gusalmighty.com: Bibas ergo Ain’t
Hindsight
Kris Corner
yongfook
Peter Zoon Zenlog

Andy Clark: Understanding Japanese Youth Culture Through the Interview
Austin Damiani: Cultivating Interdisciplinary Synthesis
John Grillo: Explorations in Learning Music in Japan
Abi Iverson: Developing My Artistic Self
Jaymie Wisneski: Understanding the Process of Artistic Creation
Rachel Winckler

Welcome to our cooperative blogging project! We are six university students studying abroad in Kyoto, through Friends World Program, an experiential learning center affiliated with Long Island University. This semester, five of us are experimenting with computer supported cooperative learning to carry out action research projects of our own. In combination with weekly face-to-face meetings, we will each be running our own blogs and cooperating with each other’s projects.

Sadly, it looks like I’m too late to this party, as the “The Semester is Over!” posts I found would seem to indicate. I’m not sure where these blogs will go from here, but at the very least, I recommend perusing the archives for each of these blogs, as I found some interesting analyses and takes on Japan and Japanese culture therein.

Actually, the site and class have undergone some “growing pains” and Ammann and I have had a fruitful email discussion about some of the issues that having the class weblog brought up, including how to get Japanese students to express themselves, in a language not their own, rather than simple links with a banal word or two about them. Seeing the site evolve over the last few weeks, I’m not sure exactly what Ammann did but the site has started to come into its own and the entries are much more expansive than when the site launched. The students are also started to contribute comments to each others’ entries. Perhaps in the end, the students just needed to become familiar and comfortable with the weblog format, which I presume they previously had not been aware of.

Having solved some technical issues, they are now also creating a group weblog in Japanese as well.

Being involved in education myself, I’m very keen on how blogging and education will interface in the future. One site in particular that I’ve been reading a lot recently is weblogg-ed, which is subtitled “using web logs in education.” This site also features a long list of “educator blogs” in its left margin.

In addition to Tawawa, here are other sites recently added to the “Other Personal Views from Japan” blogroll:

Andrea in Japan — Rambling Notes
The Blog From Another Dimension
Confessions of a Grade School Role Model
The Flounder
Jax in Japan
Jay’s Japan Journal
joshjacobson.net
Josh’s Japan Log
Life in Japan 2003
My Travels in Japan
On my mind…
Sake-Drenched Postcards
Seiji Does Japan
Sonic in Tokyo
Through Rose Tinted Glasses
Yvonna – Journal of Japan

Also, a blogger named James, who doesn’t live in Japan but who claims to be “hopelessly obsessed with Japan and travel abroad,” has created an Interactive Japan Blogger’s map using Javascript, with 47 of us on there. He’s got a bunch listed in “unknown,” so if you’re in there send him an email with your location.

Achikochi
American Lawyer in a Japanese Law Office
Art Brain
Bluesocks in Tokyo
esthet (previously mentioned here)
Fred
Fukuma Hair Flap
Gaijin in Tokyo
A Geek in Tokyo
Gen Kanai Weblog
Japaneze
Life in the Hohan
Mikan Moblog
Sync A World You Want To Explore
Underwhelmed and Overrated
Video-Link Japan

There’s also now a Japan Blogger’s Webring, put together by MJ of Cerebral Soup.