My Blog

To Dear Viewers,

I am still in a process of developing and constructing "My Blog", which I sincerely hope non-Japanese individuals will find interesting, informative, and yet intelligent so as to cause them suddenly to learn or understand what was not previously known or not well-known. In other words, the goal set for "My Blog" is to maximize the degree of "Eye-Opening Effect".

Most of the topics I deal here in "My Blog" are related to those concerns the Japanese nationals in general show their sharp reactions, whether they are negative or positive, mainly by means of twitter. According to Nielsen Online NetView, Japan has been ranked the second next to the US in terms of the number of visitors to Twitter as of April, 2010.

The use of Twitter or twitting is fun. It should better serve to satisfy the various aims the Japanese users intend to achieve only if their tweets are understood by those who have limited exposure to Japan and her language.

Since I opened "My Blog on December 20, 2010, my statistics show the numbers of page viewers by countries as below.

United States-430, Japan-357, South Korea-133, Malaysia-56, United Kingdom-44, Greece-13, Germany-12, France-12, Mongolia-12, Russia-12.

According to Wikipedia, tweet contents analysis conducted by San Antonio-based market research firm Pear Analytics shows the following results:

  News

  Spam

  Self-promotion

  Pointless babble

  Conversational

  Pass-along value

Pointless babble — 40%

Conversational — 38%

Pass-along value — 9%

Self-promotion — 6%

Spam — 4%
News — 4%

It is said that the above results are based on  an analysis of 2,000 tweets (originating from the US and in English) over a 2-week period in August 2009 from 11:00 AM to 5:00 PM (CST).

The important point I would like to emphasize here is the argument presented by social networking researcher Dr. Donah Boyd. She points out that the Pear researchers labeled "pointless babble" is better characterized as "social grooming" and/or "peripheral awareness" (which she explains as persons "want(ting) to know what the people around them are thinking and doing and feeling, even when co-presence isn't viable").

I totally agree with her argument in a sense that we all are experiencing globalization, in which every individual social networking has expanded rapidly with the use of twitter to the point that some of the tweeting population face the linguistic barriers that still limit depth and width of understanding.

Therefore, My Blog exists for those who wish to know what the Japanese in general are thinking and doing and feeling even though they tweet in different languages.

                                         My Best Wishes,

                                        Ted Yokohama

                                          January 1, 2011

Note: Many of my articles I have so far posted on My Blog are those imported from Twitlonger I often used before opening it on December 20, 2010. I still have many more articles written and stored at Twitlonger before and will gradually transfer them to My Blog for publishing.