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Asian bloggers all look the same, apparently

Here’s a variation on that “they all look alike” phenomenon that seems to afflict the vision of many who look towards the inscrutable East: Linkology – How the Most-Linked-To Blogs Relate.

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?

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Love at first write

Came across A Fish In Japan the other night and proceeded to spend time I simply don’t have reading the entire damn thing from start to finish. Can’t say that’s ever happened before, really. And for the last few days, at various spontaneous moments, I have found myself thinking about it, it’s writer, her story. That, I can tell you, has never ever happened before. (With an Rohmer film or a Woolf novel, sure. But a blog? No fucking way, as they say.)

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.

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Your life sliced and moblogged in 5 minute intervals

lifeslice.jpg

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.