Trains and Love, the perfect combination

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

Via a tip from one of my team here at UltraSuperNew, I found that apparently there is a new niche market in Tokyo.

The lucrative “girls who travel to Tokyo via Shinkansen (bullet train) in search of love” demographic is apparently on the rise and are now being catered to with their own magazine called Shinkansen&Love.

Actually it has a lot more to do with fashion, but the concept is priceless. Check out the intro video and mini-site, you will get the idea.

Posted in Digital Media | 2 Comments »

Wordpress from iPhone

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

I have held off until now about writing about anything related to the iPhone on this blog. So many people have written so much that I didn’t think another post was necessary.

However, I feel compelled to write this one just because using it encourages me to write about it.
I am writing my first post from my iPhone, so it is an appropriate time to make a mini review of the new Wordpress app for iPhone.

The Wordpress app is an application for writing posts to your Wordpress blog while on the go from your iPhone. It let’s you save your login name and password then you can get started editing or writing posts.

The good

The application was extremely easy to set up and configure. That was done in less than 1 minute after launching for the first time.

Composing a post was also very easy to get going with key fields just as you are used to in your regular wordpress interface.

Typing is as easy as using the iPhone keypad, which is easy for some, not so easy for others. For me it’s the fastest mobile input I have used.

Photos can be added directly from the phone by choosing from your photo library or taking a photo directly with the camera.

The bad

The first time I tested a post I saved a draft and tried previewing the post only to find that the system published a blank post live to my blog. Not exactly what was expected when previewing a draft.

Some of the things you can’t do include formating text with a WYSIWYG editor (although you can directly type HTML inthe post), anything involving special content in your blog and setting the position or size of your images.

Plugins that I miss include the Twitter one that auto-tweets when you publish and the Youtube widget. But both are not deal killers.

The other tricky thing with composing on the iPhone is the lack of copy-paste. This is not a limitation of the app but of the phone. It makes it pretty hard to link text in your post as many links are too long to type.

The conclusion

This is clearly going to be a great app for blogging live events… Expect to see a lot more live blogging of the next Stevenote than we already get. A quick release “take photo and blog it” workflow is going to be great for a lot of people.

You won’t stop using your regular wordpress interface but this will be a good one for getting those little posts out quickly on the run.

Now… Let’s see how this looks when I publish it.

(Note: this post was composed entirely on the iPhone app)
(Note2: the images seem to get dumped at the end of the post)

Posted in Digital Media, HOW TOs, Reviews | 2 Comments »

Top 10 Japanese Blog Widgets (Blog Parts)

Saturday, July 19th, 2008

One of the things that has long amazed me about Japanese blogs is the use of blog widgets or “blog parts” as they are referred to in Japanese. Blog widgets are small snippets of code you can insert into your blog to create fun, interesting, useful or just plain strange tools into your blog pages.

Perhaps partly because of the large number of personal diary blogs, the usage of entertaining blog widgets (often produced by brands for viral advertising) is probably at some of the highest levels in the world. For many its a great way to dress up what is often a very plain blog template and add a little of “this is what I like” factor.

These are my top 10…

10. Yamaha Pianica

Do you ever feel the need to play a musical instrument while browsing your friends’ blogs? This special blog widget lets you do just that.

9. Kiminchi no sauce

Bad coding joke or clever pun? You make the decision. Click the sauce bottle to see the page source.

ブログパーツで懸賞ゲット！ブログパーツの新しいカタチ FirstBuzz

8. Flipbook

For the artists we have a new outlet for your creative streaks. Flipbook gives you a web interface for you to draw successive frames of an animation and then plays them through your blog widget.

7. The Happening

This promotion for M. Night Shyamalan’s new film “The Happening” has some nice tricks to slowly deconstruct your blog piece by piece. The best way to understand what it is is to try it… click on the widget to see the effect.

6. Blog Level Up

The Japanese appetite for fantasy characters and role playing games hits the blog where this retro pixel avatar can level up on your blog. You can check your characters stats and add friends.

5. Maru Ten Ten = Star

Someone was thinking out of the box with this one. When clicked, the widget checks all of the text in the page, grabs all the dots in the text and darkens the screen to just highlight the dots. The effect is that your blog becomes like a night sky. The effect is even more powerful with Japanese text where you get varied sizes of stars from the big and small dots in the text.

NOTE : Doesn’t seem to work properly with Firefox 3.x, your text should fade out except for the dots.

4. Hoshi Toki no Toki

For the purely bizarre award, this blog widget takes the cake. Using a full page flash overlay, to display some animal characters full screen over your blog when you click on the insert. It changes animal over time and puts you in a nice mood for the blog avatar creator that it links to, KAOS.

3. Samurai Weapon

This blog widget promotion for Nintendo DS Game “Samurai Weapon”, is a bit subtle at first , but try clicking on the samurai character until he gets annoyed and be prepared to have your page killed in any number of samurai ways.

2. Uniqlock

Back in June 2007, the first release of the Uniqlock campaign for Uniqlo (Japanese casual wear clothing company) and this catchy blog widget that was at its core, managed to get the country buzzing. It is certainly one of the top of the most used blog widgets of all time. For this alone it deserves to be high on this list, but the execution with nice use of video and the rhythm of the clock was also very clean and the impact was almost universally positive. There have been a number of follow ups keeping the look evolving with new content, but basically the same concept. Music. Dance. Clock.

1. One Click Awards

This is the blog widget that got it all started for me. Made for the One Click Awards in 2007, it takes a cheeky premise of interaction with a little man who comes out of his widget and takes it to a new level by giving you a web ring tour with stops moving through video and pages alike. Come back after you are done ; )

UPDATE : Thanks Matt for reminding me about the 2kurabe blog widget… would have made the list if I had remembered it at the time. Nice website too. Select your preferred of two options… simple.

Posted in Digital Media, Japan Tech | 3 Comments »

Ghosts in the SNS machine

Sunday, July 13th, 2008

Recently we, as a collective internet populace, have become very good at republishing our comments, images, and other life streaming features to multiple platforms.

Our status updates are the most common, with Twitter (and for the early adopters, FriendFeed) being the easiest and most common to republish elsewhere. Some of the common places to push your updates to are the darlings of years past, LinkedIn, Facebook, Skype and of course the common blog to name a few. Most services offer a way to either push or pull these updates, so we tend to forget that when we speak in these micro mediums, we do not just speak to our friends on that stage, we speak across all our stages at once.

For me, I have all but forgotten Facebook, which stopped being interesting for me a while ago as it loaded up with applications that felt more like spam than fun. However, I still have my updates pushing there from Twitter, so for anyone who is a friend on Facebook and isn’t aware of my twitter account, it appears I am a very active Facebook status updater.

This is all well and good in that we have finally learned the lessons of write once, publish everywhere, which is surely one of the benefits of being digitally connected in this world. But what of the nature of this echo talk?

When I have my comments echoed to Facebook, the words are not written for Facebook, they just end up there. In fact, as I alluded to earlier, it is a place I often forget is even getting my updates. Without the targeted voice, we also stop listening to the responses and with this I start to see a weakness in the trend.

What we have is ghosts in the social networks, echoes of something that was said in another place being brought out of context.

Of course, FriendFeed has sought to rectify this to some extend by denoting the source of the information, setting itself up as the place to collect all your disparate conversations with the digital world. Google also has some strategies to clean up this fragmentation and duplication with Open Social and similar endevours to connect the disjointed networks with one framework. But those are the big bucket solutions, It is the trailing echoes in the networks that we no longer use that becomes the ghost.

Perhaps it is time that we stopped trying to talk to everyone (as pro-blogger Jason Calacanis has pledged to do recently), and concentrate on talking to the few important ones. The social capacities of the internet have opened us up to more new connections than we will ever need (and many that we didn’t want in the first place), but it is a seriously powerful tool for passing new information, which we now see at close to real time, and the concept of public sharing over commercialism seems to be gaining momentum at the individual level as a result.

I can deal with echoes and ghosts for the time being, as long as I give pointers to where I really exist, but the validity of various platforms seems to wane now based not on the number of accounts, but by the number of users who use it to keep up with their contacts. It becomes our telephone address book (and in some cases really becomes our telephone address book) for the 21st century.

Posted in Digital Media, Social Web | 3 Comments »

My Dutch pimp

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

OK, this post is a lot less dirty than the title.

Last week, Tessa Sterkenburg, who I know through my writing for The Next Web, launched The Next Speaker, a business to manage and represent speakers talking about new media, technology, innovation or just motivational topics based in Holland.

I was very happy to have been one of the first speakers invited to join, and my focus is on asian new media and technology (specifically Japanese) and online branding. You can find my intro page on the site, but you will need to read Dutch for now (Tessa tells me there is an English version on the way as soon as everything is rolling).

The site is mainly promoting speakers within Holland, so I hope to be back in The Netherlands soon to pick up some speaking engagements through The Next Speaker. Before you ask, no, I don’t speak Dutch, but the good people of Holland seem to not mind me presenting in English, so I think I am safe.

My last speaking gig in Holland was in Utrecht earlier this year for the kickoff to the Dutch Game Jam, where my business partner and I together gave participants an entertaining presentation about Japanese gaming culture to prepare them for developing games for Japanese mobile phones. That was a ton of fun, so I am looking forward to being back again some time soon.

To book me as a speaker in Holland or the rest of Europe, please contact Tessa.

For Japan and the rest of the world, its probably better to contact me directly at :  mike [at] ultrasupernew [dot] com

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Distributed Tweets on the brain

Wednesday, May 7th, 2008

Now that Twitter has hit Japan in Japanese, and as I wait for the first official word about how that is going for the good people at Twitter Japan, I have been putting my mind to the future of Micro-blogging and more importantly, how important is Twitter in that picture.

There have been a lot of discussions recently about ways to construct a distributed micro-blogging environment. Dave Winer triggered a conversation on distributed storage and distribution of Twitter but all the consensus amounted to was a lot of chatter about clever ways to backup your Twitter feeds to recover when Twitter goes down.

For me this doesn’t directly address the problem. It fixes Twitter uptime issues to some extent, but that is not a solution for the masses, it is a solution for the elite who can realise that this is an issue to think about in the first place. Most users will use something or not, they are not looking for ways to retrofit a service.

Elsewhere Mike Warot compares centralised internet services to silos and makes a convincing argument for using centralised services. The comparison to silos is made to discuss the need for specialists and specialised equipment to keep your grain/data safe. I agree. But another thing that makes our grain/data safe is having multiple silos. Mike’s argument only sells me on the aspect having properly supported infrastructure and technicians but I want to be able to choose the silo that doesn’t sit in the path of the tornado (continuing with his metaphor).

As mentioned in much of this discussion, the structure of micro-blogging (and we can use Twitter as the base model) can be its own data structure, not so dissimilar to RSS. There are a few different types of information that need to be requested, but surely they are all easily rendered with XML…. but something a little bit more clever to handle the unique nature of the exchange.

As it turns out, as I have been writing this post, Michael Arrington released a very nice piece outlining how Twitter could be opened up technically based on what a bunch of smart people who know about this kind of thing have been talking about. It demonstrates a viable system utilising XMPP that can push messages to clients rather than having to continually check for updates. This need to continuously check for new data is what was widely regarded as the biggest obstacle for an open Twitter-like platform.

As soon as someone does the work to get an open platform running, does that mean the end for Twitter and its hefty status as the “next best thing”?

Very likely “yes”.

The brand of Twitter will still more than likely continue but you have to think that the number of roll-your-own micro-blogging platforms will boom and eventually most of the micro-blogging for the bulk of normal users (as opposed to the geek centric Twitter users of today) will collect around the use of open micro-blogging from the big guys … Google, MSN, Mixi (for the Japanese users), Yahoo (if the shareholders don’t tear it to shreds).

Japan has really only just got started with Twittering if what we hear from Twitter Japan is true, which implies that micro-blogging is well suited to a Japanese market. The heavy use of mobile phones for accessing the internet (100million mobile users vs 85million PC users) and the heavy affinity for blogging (Japanese is the most popular blogging language in the world) would all point to a boom about to hit Japanese shores once the mainstream gets a hold of it.

Counter to support of an open platform is the reluctance to get too heavily involved with open source projects (mostly due to language difficulties)… which brings us back to Twitter Japan. The people behind Twitter Japan are Digital Garage, who have been very successful in bringing foreign web assets into the Japanese market. One of the projects that they very successfully brought in was Movable Type,… yes, an open source project. While the rest of the world moves heavily towards Word Press, Japan uses Movable Type more often than not.

Chances are the Digital Garage would be the best ones to bring such an open micro-blogging platform into a Japanese market that has some reluctance to adopt foreign projects without their hand held, but they of course have other motives with the Twitter relationship well established.

The question I have been thinking about is, “When (yes, that’s a when, not if) an open micro-blogging platform is established, will Twitter follow?”. I think the boom Japanese use of Twitter implies that Japan will have a lot to say about that.

Second question, “Does it matter?” … will Twitter be over-run by everyone else or will they have time to have  the market controlled by the time an alternative is available.

I am looking forward to finding out the answers.

Posted in Digital Media, Social Web, Web Standards | 1 Comment »

Twitter Tweets in Japanese

Friday, April 25th, 2008

I posted a story on Wednesday about the new Japanese version of Twitter over at The Next Web.

Read the story here : Twitter launches Japanese language version

I am working on more about the topic of foreign services moving into Japan and also about the nature of social web success and failure in Japan. Stay tuned.

Posted in Digital Media, The Next Web | No Comments »

Dutch-Japan GameJam winner decided

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

I spent Tuesday evening at the Dutch Embassy to sit on the final jury for the Dutch-Japan GameJam. I was in good company with representatives from Cell, Taito and the Dutch Embassy in Japan joining me on the jury.

This was the second jury stage of the GameJam, with the first being back in March, when I was over in Utrecht in The Netherlands to brief the Dutch game developers on Japanese mobile gaming and see the initial round of presentations first hand. From that initial jury, four groups were chosen to continue to develop their game concepts for the final jury held on Tuesday.

The winner was Khaeon Games with their game Water Power. Khaeon Games will now have 6 months to develop the game ahead of the Tokyo Game Show later this year.

Water Power makes use of the new tilt control feature from new DoCoMo handsets to play an innovative game involving using water to control a series of puzzles with a character that needs to navigate water logged levels. I am really looking forward to seeing Erik t’ Sas and his team get the game going.

The first runner up was O!’s game Happyard, a very inventive game where players collect animals and items for their garden in a series of minigames taking advantage of a number of different interfaces possible on mobile handsets.

The final two runners up were Ronimo with Trade Joy and 3D-Flash with Mizu Maze. Each of these final four participants will receive a cash prize for their contributions.

Posted in Digital Media, Japan Tech | 2 Comments »

Pimping The Puppets

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

Pimping The Last Shadow Puppets with a limited budget to play with, we had to try some unconventional methods. We ended up taking a unique approach by making a Gorilla Guerrilla promotion.

In Japan advertising for music involves grabbing the biggest truck that will fit down the main streets in Shibuya and covering it with a huge backlit billboards or line it with oversized flatscreen TV screens. The only way we could think to combat that was to get two guys in gorilla suits to ride a tandem bicycle waving signs to promote The Last Shadow Puppets through the middle of one of the busiest shopping areas in Tokyo.

We managed to cause a bit of havoc and have a lot of fun on the way.

For those who don’t know, The Last Shadow Puppets are Alex Turner from the Arctic Monkeys and Miles Kane from The Rascals.

Posted in Guerrilla Promotions | No Comments »

The three stages of relevance and why the social web is broken

Monday, April 21st, 2008

I have been wanting to do this story for a while based on my experiences of working with social media and trying to make sense of the growth and subsequent abandonment of many social networks.

It seems it is every month that we have another star social network, social web concept, or interaction model. Right now Twitter seems to be the golden child of the social web, but before that we had Facebook, MySpace (one of my personal least favourite) and even Friendster taking turns as the next “it” service. In Japan, the market is less volatile with Mixi being the long standing flag bearer and others such as Gree having been active and growing for an extended period, but the same market forces are at work.

Some of these services are still growing strong but the interaction is often becoming less interesting over time and eventually people will leave for the next service to capture the imagination of the masses.

In my opinion the reason for this exodus over time is due to more than fleeting trends, it is because of the way that our use of them grows through three phases. I call them…

The three stages of social media relevance.

Stage 1 : The Noob

Everyone who has joined a social network can remember that feeling of arriving and realising it is very quiet with no friends. With this being the initial experience of a social network, it is no wonder that as a new user we usually have a reaction of apathy to the new offering that we stumble on.

Some of this has been rectified by some smart tricks such as email matching from an online mail client or imports direct from another social network. Open Social also seems to offer something to aid this entry process once it has more uptake.

Even so, that initial process is about making connections before we can interact. If it is a permission based social structure this can be an even more drawn out process before we can populate our ghost town.

Stage 2 : The Happy Medium

Somewhere shortly after breaking out of the Noob stage, we see the light. Our social service’s purpose and usefulness become clear and it begins to enhance our online (and sometimes offline) social lives. Being connected serves a purpose, we add the mobile website as the start page on our brand new mobile phone, we download the desktop app and life is good.

The daily experience is that of witty banter between friends, colleagues and new acquaintances on a public or semi-public forum, of quick dissemination or absorption of information. The utility and enjoyment of the service is actually at its peak here in my opinion, although often we don’t realise it.

We look to our socially wealthier contemporaries with admiration. If I have so much value with 40 friends, how much fun will I have with double that? triple?

Stage 3 : Overeating

It would be wonderful if we all could keep our cool and stay at Stage 2, but the temptation of more followers, more friends or more contacts is too much to resist. The social kudos of breaking the 200 friends barrier, of having 300 contacts with 15,000 people at a mere two steps removed is too much to resist. There are always more people to connect with and more people to compare your gaudy numbers against.

Robert Scoble has more than 21,000 people that he follows on Twitter. That amounts to a tweet almost every second, far too much for any person to keep up with. This is an extreme example but also symptomatic of the Overeater.

The average Overeater gets started as early as 50-100 social connections. Somewhere in that range you go from keeping up to date with your friends to struggling to sift through the noise to get to the juicy content. Once you go over 100 contacts you usually start to spend more time sifting that you do reading. The purpose of the medium starts to become subverted and you lose the ability to stay connected in a convenient way.

There are clear motivations for continuing to grow your network. The obvious one is to connect with or reach as many people as possible to advertise your agenda. The reality of connecting with so many people is that the information you pass and collect becomes an unmanageable mess. The micro-blog is alive, but polluted with noise. It is broken.

Where to from here?

There is a solution somewhere and I, like many others, am searching for the next model to extend the function and positive engagement of the social web. Of course, I hope I discover it first, but regardless, I will be happy to have a model that supports growth and expansion in a more valuable way, balancing the voices that matter and subverting the ones that distract more effectively.

Posted in Digital Media, Social Web | 2 Comments »