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 »

When I was speaking at SES London, I started to lose my voice after 5 min. or so in. Yes, it’s just my luck. I apologize to people came to the session, I didn’t sound good at all. While I was speaking, I couldn’t help myself but calling “riiiiicolaaaaa” in my head. Now, that’s the power of advertising and marketing, isn’t it? The search is great, and it’s going to be even better, but in my opinion, it will never replace TV ads. Through the search, the businesses can only connect to people if and when they happen to search what you offer. On the other hand, TV ads push what they want you to know, again and again. Then I was thinking, what would be the closest thing on Internet to TV ads… Perhaps it’s the banner ads, but we all know that many banner ads are ignored, people skip right over the ads and read what they want to read on the page. Continue Reading »

We all talked about how popular SNS and video sharing became in Japan in 2007. As the rest of the world starting to pay attention to these as new means of marketing, “2007 Web services usage survey” done by Japan.Internet.com hints that Japanese are already looking for the next “thing”.

According to the survey, BBS (bulletin board services), Net auction and surprisingly the Video sharing lost some popularity in 2007 from the previous year. Continue Reading »