Friday, September 05, 2003

Link Knowledge! Got a glimpse into the Japanese blogging space tonight at Link Knowledge! This is an area I've wanted to explore, but haven't yet due to my lack of reading and writing. I wanted to get an idea of what Japanese people think about blogging and find out what's going on here. There were two speakers. Taguchi-san and Daiji-san. Both are Japanese blog book authors. I didn't get a chance to speak w/ Taguchi-san. Daiji-san is someone I got to see in a panel discussion at the 1IMC a couple of months back. He's part of Joi Ito's Neoteny and created the Japanese patch for MovableType. I got a chance to speak w/ him and pick his brain. VERY knowledgeable person regarding what's going on in the blogging space here in Japan and around the world. I can see why he's the Chief Research Manager at Neoteny. Interesting people I bugged (not spy stuff) and other notes: Nob Seki of the same company as Daiji-san. Note to myself ... he mentioned that he'll help w/ setting up TrackBack for my MoBlog. ;) Nakamura-san of Honda: Had a conversation regarding English and European languages have an advantage over asian languages due to the way the language is structured. Especially Japanese having so many "fuzzy" words. "Bi myou". Also, got into a discussion on blogs in the Enterprise w/ Daiji-san. Something to the effect of blogs could help the "real" minds get credit where credit is due. Make it difficult for free riders taking advantage of your ideas. Suda-san of Steelcase: lived in New Orleans for awhile, now part of an innovative company that sells modern office furniture. The event was held at this awesome office. Self intro'd myself to Kohici Aoki of Sony. I think I found his blog through Gen Kanai's. He has photos on his site of this event. The blog system he uses is called Plone and runs on a Python based CMS called Zope. We swapped some ideas on MoBlogging. He showed me a kewl gadget, but I didn't get a chance to ask him. Also saw another person with it ... Linux Zaurus. Looks like a GameBoy Advance SP w/ a little more keys ;) Link to Daiji's post post. Lot's of trackbacks, let's see if my trackback goes through. He mentioned that another way of explaining trackbacks is reverse linking. People usually leave trackbacks, because they want the original poster to know that I've got an interest on your post and I wrote or added some thoughts about it on my site. Personal WebService Platform -> Microcontent (by category, date(s), etc) + MetaData(RSS) + Webservices(APIs). Reason RSS took off was because blogs took off. Didn't think about building a massive all encompassing system. Just a simple and easy to use CMS w/ built in WebServices and RSS. Where's the Semantic Web? Any apps out there. US' got Social Networks (social software like friendster or tribes), which Japan is 5 years behind. Japan's got Mobile Networks, which US is 5 years behind. Merging both ways. Open invite to all developers to jump into this space now. Lot's of opportunities and easy to jump into. Standards are still simple. A question that popped up a couple of times was How different is US and Japanese blogs. Couple of RSS News Reader app developers were present. When you think of WebServices you think of Enterprise-class. Blogs include WebServices made for Peronal-class. Japanese blog aggregation site: rss-jp.net Similar to Technorati?: MyBlog Japan 3:47:58 AM    comment []