Lost in Japan

I’m sure that all of you are familiar with the Technorati Top 100 – the list of the most influential (as in, linked to) blogs right now. The bloggers on this Top 100 list are the so-called “A-Listers” of the blogging world.

Anyway, when reading through the Top 100 you will find a lot of famous names and probably a lot of sites you yourself visit often, if not daily. However, I can bet you that there are lots of blogs on the Top 100 which you never heard of, let alone visited, because one simple reason: they are in Japanese. Yes, there are quite a few Japanese blogs on the Top 100 list actually – it surprised me a little.

So I thought I would do all you non-Japanese speakers a favor and describe what the top-ranked (according to Technorati) Japanese blogs are about. After going through most of them I noticed an odd trend…I shall return to it with my conclusions after the list!

2. Itmedia.co.jp
More of a newsposting site than a traditional blog – it has all the latest Japanese and world wide IT news listed in different categories.

18. pcweb.mycom.co.jp
Also more of a IT-news site than a blog – this is owned by Japanese media company Mainichi Communications.

22．Ganbare, seikyo no Shiraishi-san
This is the first “real” blog – written by an employee of Tokyo Agricultural University.

25. AV Watch
Another new site, this time the Audio&Video part of the Watch Impress media site.

36. Manabe Kaori no koko dake no hanashi
This blog belongs to actress and mode Kaori Manabe .

45. @Newz.jp
This is basically a Japanese Digg. Even the interface is virturally identical.

48. Tetsuba tekito Nikki
A blog written by a guy who apparantly has travelled around Japane on his motorcycle – there are lots of pictures from his trip.

73. Excite Oddly Enough
Excite Japan’s newssite with odd news around the world.

77. ITmedia PC Update
Well, another subsection of the IT media news site.

83. Shokotan Blog
Singer/Model Shoko Nakagawa’s personal blog.

92. Geino and Sports Kawaraban
A guy in Osaka posting about entertainment, sports, and current events.

Well, do you see the dominating pattern here? The majority of the Japanese “blogs” dominating the Technorati Top 100 are not really blogs at all! Sure, I’d go along and call that Digg-clone a blog, but most of the news sites above are produced by big media companies and are just, traditional news sites. I don’t know what to say about this, other than that perhaps the Technorati staff either do not check foreign (as in non-English) blogs for content, or sites like ITMedia and Myweb are OK for inclusion on the Blog Ranks. In that case, CNN & New York Times should be included as well…

So, what started as a post that was going to inform the world on what are “hot topic” blogs in Japan, turned into a boring list of news sites which have somehow managed to get into the Top 100 blogs of the Internet. Wrong? I think so, but it’s just my opinion.