Motoko’s weblog

Nagano police station received a report on April 24 about a bomb threat posted on Wikipedia Japan’s Nagano station page and Beijing Olympic page. The post said, “A hand made bomb will destroy Nagano station at noon on April 26. It will kill passengers, station workers and everyone there.” The post has been deleted, and Nagano police is investigating the case. Beijing Olympic’s torch relay is scheduled to go through Nagano on April 26.

User generated content is great, but it’s also true that the benefits of Web2.0 can also become issues and problems to the site owners and users. Beside the obvious issues such as:

• too much information makes it difficult to find what you are looking for,
• many conflicting information (not sure what to believe),
• difficult to manage and to control new content, Continue Reading »
  

While Japan’s popular Social Networking Services (SNS) still increasing the number of registered users (mixi with 14 million users and Gree with 4 million users), it’s a fact that the “newness” of these services has worn out. Many people are now on these SNS sites less frequently and spending less time.

goo Research and Internet.com’s survey results show that people started to lose interests in SNS sites about 10 months ago. Since mixi opened in February 2004, has the SNS market in Japan peaked out already? If so, what do SNS sites need to do to survive or even to increase active users?

With my experience, it was fun to be invited and to invite friends to join these sites at the beginning. Till then, I was visiting lots of websites owned by my friends to communicate by posting comments on their BBSs. It was getting to be a lot of work, and was definitely time consuming. Continue Reading »