Motoko’s weblog

People have been saying that “mobile is the next big thing” for a while in US, but mobile has been “happening” in Japan for years and continues to grow.

According to Seed Planning’s report, the mobile advertising will become 100 billion yen (US$1 billion) market in 2008 in Japan from 81.5 billion yen in 2007. The number includes all of the advertising activities on mobile platform such as banner ads, affiliate ads, search paid ads and mailing ads. If it continues to grow at the same pace, the mobile advertising market will reach 250 billion yen by 2011.

The similar advertising is available for both PC version of the web and mobile version of the web. However, what works on PC market doesn’t always work the best with mobile market. For example, the report shows that the e-mail ads work better with mobile market than PC market. To run a successful advertising against mobile market, the advertisers must be flexible in selecting what style of advertising works the best for them instead of just re-cycling the same information and the practices they used in PC market.

I just downloaded a tool bar for new Japanese bookmarking site called “Imakore” (beta). (I don’t like adding tool bars to my browser, but it’s the only way to use the service…) There are many bookmarking services out there already in Japan (popular services include “Hatena”, Livedoor’s “Clip!”, Yahoo’s “MyBookmark” and “fc2bookmark”, why did I decide to try this service?

What makes Imakore different from other bookmarking services is the function lets users to write and to read the comments right on the bookmarked page. With the tool bar, you can see how many Imakore users are on the same page at the same time, and read other users comments as well as leave the comments on the “particular area of the page” where you want to comment. It’s like a bookmarking version of Pop-up video. It’s definitely a fun way to bookmark pages and to socialize with other users.

Many people use the social bookmarking services in both US and Japan, but I sometimes wonder what percentage of bookmarked sites are actually shared with other users. I mean, it seems that most of the users bookmark their favorite sites but don’t care to see the sites bookmarked by others. There are only a few bookmarking sites appear in the search results. I think that Imakore found a way to make it easier to share the bookmarks.

Sure, there’s a concern about what people may comment. You don’t want to see bunch of “Woo, this is funny!” or “OMG, it’s crazy” kind of comments over and over. But when you come across with a site with some clever comments that make you laugh or go “hmmmmm”, it’d show the value and I can see that people may be hooked on this type of service.

By the way, what made me laugh when I first landed this website was their demo on the top page. It shows someone searching “Yahoo” in Google to go to Yahoo site. LOL!

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,

I think it’s a bigger problem in Japan because of their tendency to:

• believe what they read, especially on the popular sites and the authoritative sites,
• believe that many user generated content are monitored and trustworthy,
• believe that it’s secure and safe,

and sadly, the anonymity side of these application brings the worst of some people, which leads to problems like this bomb threat on Wikipedia, and hate messages on blogs and rapidly growing unofficial school sites.

Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) has “Web2.0 study group”. I’ve read their meeting minutes. The discussion has been focused on how to implement Web 2.0 application rather than the issues and the problems with them. MIC also has the Online Information Security site, which talks about the virus, spam mails, online shopping, security, privacy, phishing, etc., but nothing about the user generated content.

I value and believe in the freedom of speech, but I’m also concerned about these problems, which will only increase in near future, and won’t go away. Is it a site owner’s responsibility to monitor and manage the content? Maybe to the certain level, but if they over do it, it would kill what great about these applications.

Last year, Cabinet Office Government of Japan (CAO) conducted a survey about the Internet Security Awareness. It shows that 45% of people has concern about the safety of Internet, mainly about the scams and the security issues. I thought it was interesting that the online security issues related to dating sites and community sites were limited to children under 18 on that survey. More than 70% of people think that the site owner is responsible to monitor and manage the content.