Category: Japan – Blogging

Some take-aways from Friday night’s Blogger’s party:

*Need to spend more time thinking about archiving, making it easier for folks to access the archives, and for all those folks who come from Google and elsewhere to find what they came here looking for. Good discussion with Kristin and Paul about this.

*Need to follow-up Adam Greenfield‘s lead about “metadata” and “faceted classification” and ensuring that what I create today is useable in the future. And I will try to heed Adam’s advice that I shouldn’t be so self-deprecating.

*There’s no answer to the question as to why some blogs get a ton of comments per entry, and some blogs (like this one) don’t. But a good discussion about that one all the same.

*I’m not the only one who feels pressure to maintain their blogs.

*Need to take more pictures. Thanks Mike for the push.

*Need to remember that if I’m going to post about the haircut I had the day before the party, it will surely come up in conversation.

*I have no idea how to pronounce the name of this site. Never envisioned that would be a problem until Friday night.

*Open your eyes when someone’s taking your photo, no matter how much you feel the photo will look (for it will look worse if your eyes are closed).

*A lot of talk about BBS’s and the old days, and the implied links to blogging. Sadly, most of it was over my head, having come to online communication after that.

*Thoroughly enjoyed a nice non-blogging conversation about parenthood with Mike’s wife, Karen.

*3½ hours was not nearly enough time to meet all the different bloggers there, nor to have quality conversations with all of them, especially when one isn’t Mr. Congeniality. There’s always next time (I hope).

Now, if I could only have taken away some of the food!

Big thanks to Mike and Nadine for organizing everything.

Other reads (some with photos) on the event can be found at:
Antipixel
Big in Japan
Cerebral Soup
Domo Domo
The Dynamic Duo
Japan Blog
Japan-Sync
Stuart Woodward
Wirefarm

UPDATE (March 3): Co-organizer Hunkabutta Mike has put up up his photos and comments (see 03.02.03 entry), and Mie has written up something as well, accompanied by shots from her cellphone.

An American in Tokyo
Calling Kevin
Dana Goes to Japan
East of the Sun
Kyushu Journal
Lenz Blog
of cabbages and kings
Parataxis
Tokyo Boy
Wirefarm
Worldnet Japan

UPDATE: I should have used this post as an opportunity to mention the Tokyo blogger’s party that will be happening tomorrow night (Friday, February 28th) at The Pink Cow in Harajuku. Just in case you haven’t heard about it yet. At the risk of scaring anyone off, I’ll be there.

The Yomiuri Shinbun published another article on blogging in yesterday’s evening edition, which you can see by clicking on the image to the left, which spells out burogu in Japanese katakana script (the script usually reserved for words borrowed from other languages). This marks the second week in a row that the newspaper, in their Internet and Technology section, has written about blogging. (And according to the article, there will be yet another article in next Tuesday’s evening newspaper, on how blogging is perhaps having an effect on traditional journalism).

This week’s story is headlined Gijutsu nakutemo puro nami, which loosely translated, comes to something like “No matter your skill level, you can be a pro.” Whereas last week’s article focused more on the content management system developed by Blogger, this week’s article centers on Movable Type‘s software, and even features a picture of MT creators Ben and Mena Trott (taken at last month’s MT users get-together arranged by Joi Ito and Neotony). It discusses the Movable Type Japanese language pack developed by Daiji Hirata, and similar to last week’s article, talks at length about how software like Movable Type makes it very easy for those who have no web site or home page building experience to get up and running. (It uses the analogy of car owners who for the most part know next to nothing about the inner workings of their car nor how it runs, yet are able to drive it around at ease).

I know a couple of people mentioned that they found last week’s article helpful to explain to their Japanese friends and co-workers exactly what blogging is, so I made the image of the article large enough so one can either forward the image URL to others, or save the image to your hard-drive and then print it out (again, you can get to it by clicking on the image at the top of this post).

After my post the other day on blogging and how mainstream it really is, which was occassioned by a comment regarding something I had said about the first Yomiuri article last week, I came across this post and comment thread at Joi Ito’s site which speaks to the issue of blogging’s accessibility to a wider audience (specifically his blog, but I think a lot of us who blog can relate to it), and how language can be one barrier to that. Joi takes up someone on the suggestion that there might be a need for a blogging glossary, and others chime in with some links to various “blog glossaries” that exist out there. Unfortunately none of them I would take seriously (do we really need definitions for juvenile one-off terms like blogvana or blogule?), so it would seem the still exists a need for something like this.