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Japan and the Blogosphere

A Japan Times editorial published today reveals that according to “a recent survey,” Japanese is the most popular language in the global blogosphere. We’ll get back to why that may not be true in a minute. But first, let’s look at the article’s merits, at least from a business standpoint. The piece points out that blogs fill an important role in society by giving people a place to vent and express themselves when they might otherwise find it impossible to do so. At the same time, Japan has a high rate of adoption when it comes to high-tech devices and gadgets; people are familiar with the digital world and likely to try out new forms of technology.

Although the editorial mentions the importance of ‘chatting’ and the near impossibility of striking up a conversation with a stranger, blogs satisfy a need far greater than that. Blogs allow people to group themselves by interest and find others with similar interests. We might even say that they allow one to expand the ’social network,’ should such a concept exist. Or, pushing it even further, they allow one to engage in ’social networking.’ Perhaps the marketing people can turn that into something…

Point is, blogs are popular in Japan. This much is true. Any business plan involving blogs and Japan should be able to communicate the reasons why quite clearly, with a little more research. Couple this with Dentsu’s recent report claiming that online advertising has potential for “growth into a 750 billion yen plus market by 2011″ and you have a powerful recipe for building a business online in Japan.

Let’s get back to the idea that Japanese is the most popular language in the blogosphere. The editorial does not mention which ‘recent survey’ it has obtained its data from, but I think it’s safe to assume that they are talking about Technorati’s State of the Live Web for April 2007, which has already been written about, cited, criticized and discussed by millions of bloggers worldwide since being published on April 5.

The report shows Japanese being the language of 37% of global blogs, with English representing 36%. Chinese comes in third at 8%. Click here to view the chart from Technorati in a new window.

You might think that Chinese at 8% is low. I think it’s a bit low, but what really surprises me is that Korean does not appear on the list at all. Hey…something must be up.

And then you realize: This data comes from Technorati, a service that bloggers have to sign up for in order for their blogs to be counted. Technorati has websites in English, Japanese, French, German and Italian, but no website in Chinese or Korean. That is bound to skew the data, since bloggers in those countries are thus less likely to be reported in Technorati’s statistics. There had been rumors that Technorati was blocked in China. But, more concretely, in December 2006 it was announced at Micro Persuasion that:

Work on the Asian language [Technorati] sites - Korean and Chinese - has ceased. In China there are access issues and Korea data quality is less than desirable because most blog platforms don’t ping. That’s the nature of the culture.

So, we see that Technorati’s data, while certainly useful, is not going to give a completely accurate snapshot of what’s going on in the global blogoshpere. What does this mean for your business plan?

Be careful. VC guys are smart, do their research and they are going to find the holes in the Technorati data. Nonetheless, it should still be easy to make the case that the blogoshpere is huge in Japan, it’s growing and it offers lots of room for upward growth and profit potential. Most of all: show you know the flaws in the research and conventional wisdom and: Be unique.

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