Posts Tagged blogs

Feb
24

The Japanese A-List?

Posted by on Friday, 24 February, 2006

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.

Feb
15

How did these people end up on my site?

Posted by on Wednesday, 15 February, 2006

Well I may be shooting myself in the foot by posting this, but I went through my stats today (I use the wonderful BAStats plugin for WordPress) and just for fun I checked all referring pages since I enabled the stats.

I found some puzzling entries at the end of the list, let me tell you that!! I wonder, how (and why) on earth these people ended up on my site. Here are some of the more obscure search terms:

“death + sword” (an image search… dude, I don’t even know what you were looking for)
“my japan trip june 2005” (huh? It looks like someone’s vanity search, but why click on someone else’s page?)
“videos de michael jackson en japan” (nope… no videos of Michael Jackson here!!)
“death” (another image search…probably the same guy as above! Get some help, please!)
“japan av movie” (What? In no way do I have anything adult-related here! I’m appalled!)
“How to tie Geisha hair” (And again I am completely dumbfounded. Yes there is one mention of Geisha, but that’s it.)
“why am I a failure?” (The answer is not here, my friend.)
“outrageous stuff” (Should I be flattered?)
“japan nail design” (And again… Whaaaat?)
“johan models” (Hmmm… What in God’s name was the person doing this search trying to find?)
“extreme hair groth” (Well, there’s nothing extreme about my hair. Myabe you’re looking for my brother?)
“Talk to the hand” (Ok, fine, but first: why my hand?)
“japan hand job” (That’s just inappropriate search behavior dude.)

Wow… Some interesting stuff going on, wouldn’t you say? By the way, I would like to give a shout out to the top three referrers of all time (well, since October really, since that was when I installed BAStats):

www.japundit.com
www.aice.org
An Englishman in Osaka

Jan
30

This just might be the best blonde joke ever

Posted by on Monday, 30 January, 2006

I usually don’t just repost fun stuff I found on the Internet on this blog, but this joke I found over at Herro Flom Japan might just be the best blonde joke ever! I’m sorry if you’ve already seen, because it’s been doing the e-mail rounds for a while now… But it’s worth it.

Jan
09

New feature on Lost in Japan – Photo Galleries

Posted by on Monday, 9 January, 2006

After much procrastinating, I finally added a Photo Gallery section to the blog. You can reach it from the blue menu to the left.

Or bookmark the link to it: http://lostinjapan.groth.hm/galleries/

I have not yet moved all my galleries from my old homepage to here, but I’m working on it. For now, please enjoy some photos I took last year in Asakusa and Kyoto.

If you’re interested in technical details, I am currently using a Canon Powershot A95 to take the photos. I feel it suits my needs, and it produces good level of image quality for its price. To save webspace I don’t upload the photos in their original sizes, but if there’s a photo you really really like and would like a hi-res copy of it, just drop me a comment or e-mail.

Jan
09

Help me with my CSS!

Posted by on Monday, 9 January, 2006

OK, I’ve had enough with Internet Explorer’s poor implementation of CSS!! I browse alsmost exclusively in Firefox, so I have been living under the impression that this blog looks fine for everyone. However, I recently changed monitor which now displays at 1280×1024 resolution, and it turns out that if you view this site in IE in any other resolution than 1024×768 it looks weird (specifically, the left sidebar moves too much to the left or right, depending on screen size).

I have a conditional CSS clause in my HTML to fix for IE (otherwise it would move all the way to the right) but it doesn’t seem to do the trick perfectly. If you view this site in Firefox, both bars will scale perfectly with increasing/decreasing of the viewing windows.

So, I need help! Please if anyone would be so kind as to look at my source and see if it’s possible to fix! Maybe I have to recode the CSS layout from scratch again – right now it’s a patch work built on the Kubrick source.