You can read it in today’s (March 19th) Japan Times print version or online here : http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nc20080319a1.html

Still hungry for more? I also have a new article on The Next Web today about the new interface changes from the Japanese Google top page. Check it out!

As we wind down on 2007, it’s a good time to look back and see how much the Internet landscape has changed in the last year.

Internationally there have been some big shakeups, led by the dramatic effects of the meteoric rise of Facebook to prominence, both good and bad. On these shores, too, there has been plenty of online action, so we’ve rounded up some of the events that have reshaped the Japanese Internet landscape this year.

The big hit

Nico Nico Douga

Any discussion about the top Internet stories of 2007 starts and finishes with Nico Nico Douga. This video-sharing site is uniquely Japanese, blending online video-sharing with user-created, short chat-like text comments that are synced to the movies, allowing whole conversations to flow across the frame. The type of content has ranged from the crude to the incredibly insightful and inventive, and some users have even subtitled music videos with the song’s lyrics. The videos themselves are a geek’s paradise, consisting mainly of anime, video-game footage and videos of young ladies. The unique format and addictive nature of the Web site has millions tuned in, giving it one of the most dramatic growth surges ever as it went from a January launch to become the seventh-most visited Web site in Japan as of December, according to global site-ranking service Alexa.com.

[ NB: I wrote a follow up article about how to register so you can see Nico Nico Douga content ]

Mobile gaming gets the big company treatment

Disney Wonder Days

Following in the footsteps of the innovative 2006 avatar-based mobile-gaming platform MobaGe-Town, this April Disney threw in its hat with a big press push and its own avatar-based game and social-interaction platform. Disney Wonder Days capitalized on the brand popularity and makes its money from monthly subscriptions. The range of games is pretty slick and offers Disney fans a healthy selection of characters. What it represented mostly was media giant Disney jumping into the mobile social media space to capture the hugely lucrative children’s market. You know the scene is changing when the big names get involved.

Ad campaigns

Uniqlock

Japan’s most successful online ad campaign this year was arguably the “Uniqlo Clock.” The campaign consisted of a Flash-based clock, a rhythmic beat and ballet dancers moving to the clock’s rhythm. A simple idea got nationwide attention, joining television and Web seamlessly. Part of the success was due to the engaging execution and the blog widgets Uniqlo provided, so that any blogger could implement the ad on their own blog — something that thousands chose to do freely, greatly expanding the exposure of the campaign into the “blogosphere.”

PepsiNex Dance

This great use of new Flash technology let users draw their own character and then watch it dance on a stage in the middle of the screen in 3-D. When you visit the Web site you get to see characters that other people have created earlier, too — a great example of consumer-generated media blending with advertising, and a banner-bearer for advertisers the nation over.

Nike Cosplay

The Nike Cosplay campaign was one of the most joyful virals of the year. Picture a bunch of skintight body-suited ninja chasing a lone salary man down the street through the middle of Tokyo’s electronics district, Akihabara. The campaign managed to blend a bit of Nike cool with some fun and an infectious video on YouTube. That this viral wasn’t shown on other media (such as television) says a lot for the quick uptake of YouTube in Japan.

The foreigners invade

YouTube

YouTube, the biggest user-generated video site on the planet, finally made an official entrance into the Japanese market this year. After a troublesome 2006, when Japanese TV networks ganged up on YouTube with a huge takedown order on television programs that Japanese users had been uploading en-masse to the English-language version of the site, the move into Japanese language could be considered incredibly successful. There is still a lot of TV content on YouTube, but the relationship with the networks seems to be improving and it looks like the site has created a good base in Japan.

Twitter

Why do people feel the need to post micro messages about what they do at every single moment of the day? Answer that and you will understand Twitter’s success. Initially launched in 2006 in the United States, Twitter found that after launching a mobile interface in early 2007, it experienced a strange user-base shift. While the interface was still entirely in English, the posts on Twitter started to become very quickly dominated by Japanese-language posts. The simplicity and accessibility of the Twitter interface and the mobile Internet-friendly Japanese market seemed to overcome the usual extreme reluctance of the Japanese to go into foreign-language territory, and put Twitter and microblogging on the map for Japanese users.

The dinosaurs wane

Mixi

Mixi has dominated the SNS (social network services) market for a while now in Japan, but with upstart networks and blogging platforms such as Gree making some new moves, and a lot of investors to please after it went public in late 2006, Mixi made some changes to its aging platform in 2007. These cosmetic tweaks were minimal and didn’t include the changes that many were waiting for, but it was a good first step. It tidied up the interface and improved several usability issues. Are the changes enough, and are they happening fast enough? Probably not, but, in fairness, they haven’t had time to really have an impact yet. For now the waning traffic on Mixi in 2007 (down almost 40 percent since January, according to Alexa.com), can be seen as symptomatic of its inability to keep fresh.

2Channel

2Channel has long been the place to vent frustrations online in Japan. Its forums have always had a steady stream of anonymous complaints or gossip pouring in to spill the dirt, mostly on posters’ companies or pet hates. That early Web popularity has now started to become one of the downfalls of “Ni Chan,” as many large corporations have begun to block the site on their local network. The other thing fighting against 2Channel is the antiquated and hard-to-use interface. It really is a dinosaur of the early 2000s, when it grew to prominence, and is in dire need of a face lift. Since January the site has been shedding users, and it’s likely that 2008 will bring a bigger downslide if some things don’t change.

Yahoo Japan

Of course, Yahoo Japan still dominates the Japanese online market with the search, auctions, mail and other features driven from its portal. It is by far the No. 1 site in Japan, handling more traffic than the No. 2 and 3 sites combined (FC2 and Google Japan respectively). But in 2007, Yahoo Japan’s fortunes dropped to the tune of almost 20 percent, continuing a trend from 2006.

Yahoo Japan is not part of the global Yahoo brand and as such has missed a lot of the new innovation coming from outside Japan. The site is certainly geared toward the Japanese style of having lots of little text links everywhere on a page. To Western eyes this looks cluttered, although it generally gets a positive response from the Japanese public. But do the falling traffic numbers over 2007 represent the beginning of a backlash against this style and a focus on usability in Japan?

2007 has seen the beginning of exciting changes in the Japanese Internet industry, with the rise of new faces and the old faces coming back down to reality — if only just a little.

There will doubtless be new steps taken gingerly or boldly in 2008. Likely growth areas for the industry are in interaction between Web services and Web applications, such as sharing weather information and the like; more focus on taking Japanese ideas international; and, with a new range of mobile handsets recently released and more on the way that are increasingly capable of Web trickery, perhaps the mobile Internet will come a step closer to performing seamlessly with the regular Internet.

Either way, it’ll be fun finding out.

Media distribution methods are changing, and what it brings is not all bad for creators.

Over the last year or two, Tokyo-based minimal-techno producer Shane Berry (shaneberry.com) saw online media remolding his industry and set about exploring how he should adapt to deal with the new online marketplace and how that affects him in the real world.

The way the average person consumes media has changed dramatically over the last few years largely as a result of BitTorrent, an open file-sharing system that utilizes the power of multiple Internet-connected users to transfer digital files. In 2004, it was estimated that BitTorrent was responsible for around 35 percent of all Internet traffic. Today it is often quoted on tech blogs as being 45-55 percent of traffic on the Net.

Streaming media has also become common. Thanks to faster Internet connections and services such as video-streaming site YouTube, the quality and speed of streaming-content delivery makes the Internet a useful tool with which to find media-rich content. YouTube is currently the 4th most popular Web site In Japan, according to Web statistics site Alexa.com. Also appearing in the top 10 is Nico Nico Douga, another video-sharing site with a unique Japanese twist, allowing users to comment directly onto the video.

This changes the model for distributing a media creator’s work.

For musicians, previously the standard way to get music heard was to sign with a label and have them promote and sell records or CDs. Now musicians are more and more likely to have their big break via a viral YouTube video or bootleg BitTorrent download.

What Berry found is that there are alternatives and viable options to replace many aspects of a record-label system that has a bad reputation and is struggling to deliver what customers want.

First, artists should have an idea of who owns the material they have created. Berry quickly realized that for many musicians the answer is “not me.” The owner is often the music label that signed them.

Many creators internationally and in Japan know little about what they own and what their rights are relating to the music or other digital media they make. For some musicians, it may not be important to own the work, but owning and controlling how your content is used has some obvious benefits if you want to build on that work, and especially if you want to allow others to build on it at some point in the future.

After realizing you want to gain control of your own creations, it is necessary to look at what controls what are available now. Simply put, that means copyright laws, which are different in every country but mostly revolve around some basic principles to stop other people doing things with your creation.

Creators can define the rights that they wish to claim on a work, and usually this means claiming that nobody can do anything without the copyright-holder’s permission. For musicians, once again, this copyright-holder is often not them. For other media creators, you will need to be careful where you sign away permissions of ownership.

Berry’s research revealed that, integral to the creative process throughout history, is the ability to copy from and change a work — from stories passed around a campfire and down through generations, to music and art movements whose quintessential works are a result of inspiration from earlier works by other artists.

“People who create every day know that our ideas don’t come from us,” says Berry. “The inspiration comes from external stimuli.

“You create a child, you nurture it and then you let it go. Ideas are the same. You create them, nurture them and then let them go. If we don’t treat our ideas like children, then we don’t have a next generation of ideas.”

For content creators to decide how to make their content public, they need to be clear about what the goals are. Berry’s goal is to reach as many people as he can with his music. The more people that hear his music, the more people there are that will come to his live performances. Online distribution can provide a potential audience of many thousands compared with the relatively small number who may stumble upon his music in a record shop.

Most of the money Berry earns from music comes from live performances rather than from record sales. In his case, it is of benefit to publish digitally and cheaply or for free. From the extra people he will reach, there is a very good chance that he will find new fans who will become regulars when he plays live. The royalties Berry would make from record sales are outweighed by live performing fees and the good feeling of reaching more people with his music.

Digital-distribution options are increasingly accessible and largely free. It is not going to cost Berry anything to publish a new track to online music networks and utilize file-sharing systems such as BitTorrent to spread the work.

In order to have some level of legal control over what happens to his work, a strong option is Creative Commons. Founded by Lawrence Lessig in 2001, Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that “provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry.”

Creative Commons Licensing is Web-based, free to use and includes a summary in words that you don’t need to be a lawyer to understand. It covers most of the needs of a small media-creator and makes it easy to define what you are happy for others to do with your work. This includes licensing options for Japan, with Japanese licenses translated into 38 other languages.

Self-publishing content or working through an existing network that allows Creative Commons licensing options is fine, but there are some traps in getting your content online that are worth noting.

When you upload a photo on Japanese powerhouse social network Mixi, you are not able to set permissions for reuse of that image and reserve the right to display your image within the context of the site. Overseas, the rights you give away are scarier. A recent attempt by U.S.-based social network Facebook to integrate your friends’ profiles and photos with advertising met with a huge user backlash, but the terms-of-use agreement and privacy policy supported that usage and actually allowed Facebook to do much more than it did.

So, in a world of digital distribution, are the old dinosaurs of content distribution dead, making way for brash new attempts at controlling your content and the informed taking control of their own?

“Certainly not,” says Berry, talking about the role of record labels. “However, the role of the label needs to change, and it needs to change fast. Previously it was about distribution; now digital distribution is practically free, so it is hard for me to justify using a label for that. What I need from them now is the social connections. A record label should be able to get my music in front of people who shape opinion, people who can continue to promote the music. If I were to do the whole process by myself, I would be lost in the noise, so it is the knowhow of standing out from that noise that I look for in a label.”

Toyo Yokota is the vocalist with Tokyo hardcore band Newbreed. They have a decent following, play five to eight gigs a month and are signed to two independent labels for their various releases. For Toyo and Newbreed, the labels actually provide a very valuable service.

What do they provide?

“Everything,” says Yokota. “Gigs, recording, promotion, transportation, tours, practice studios — you name it.”

So it seems there is a new balance emerging, brought about by the falling cost of distribution as a result of the digitization of content. The role of the former distribution platforms is shifting toward the service of organization and social connections.

Of course they now have a race on their hands with the new media moguls, the Mixis, Facebooks and MySpaces of the world starting to move into their territory and control online content.

As Berry looks to decide what he will do next with his music, the dust clears on options for content creators in a digital age. While the infrastructure is not yet in place, there are a lot of people moving very fast to get there.

You can own your own music. The option of self-publishing is real and already a viable option, with home studios providing high quality audio and video.

Licensing without lawyers is possible to do and understand through Creative Commons Licenses, also allowing for the redistribution of your work with the limitations you choose.

But the last piece in the puzzle is getting heard or seen by the right people. This is the area where external help can benefit artists the most, but it is only a matter of time before online options become equally effective; the current crop of upstart music sites, video-sharing platforms and social networks are already Getting very close, but beware of what you give away when you use them.