March 12th, 2009
“On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.” -- The words of a well-known adage dating back to a New Yorker cartoon from 1993 capture the anonymity people generally expect from online communication. This week a new take on this adage hit the Japanese blogosphere when a blogger discovered that two of his closest friends on Twitter were actually bots designed as part of a programming contest.
March 3rd, 2009
Spring is fast approaching, and in Japan that means two things: the fall of cherry blossoms and the start of the new school year, which coincides with last year's graduates joining the workforce. One blogger and university professor posted a letter to a student which struck a drew a huge reaction among Japanese bloggers. The first line of the letter begins, "To you who will graduate this year"...
March 1st, 2009
Japanese blogger id:eliya, who is doing economics research abroad, writes that he is often asked by colleagues why Japanese work so hard [ja]. Referring to economics professor Masami Nomura's book, “Employment Instability” (雇用不安) [ja], he explains that Japanese work hard basically because the penalty for being fired from your job is very high: Japanese corporations, for example, are unlikely to hire a worker who has already been fired from another job mid-career.
February 27th, 2009
February 14th, 2009
February 13th, 2009
Motohiko Tokuriki at Tokuriki.com posts a long discussion [ja] of the recent PayPerPost incident at Google Japan. Tokuriki writes that while he does not agree with the PayPerPost approach, there is nonetheless a distinction to be made between the PayPerPost strategy in which funding is openly acknowledged, and the strategy in which it is not; this case came to light precisely because it was mentioned in posts that the bloggers in question were participating in a CyberBuzz campaign.