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Terrie’s take on Japan’s cyberspace; Japan’s spam blogs

April 7, 2008
By Ken Worsley


If you don’t regularly follow, Terrie Lloyd’s weekly Terrie’s Take is a newsletter worth reading. This week Terrie focuses on Japan’s web businesses and cyberspace statistics. One number that caught my attention was that Japan’s 47.8 million Internet users viewed an average of 1,730 web pages each in February. These numbers come from NetRatings, and though I haven’t dug into the data to see how many web sites the average person visits, I hope to get time to do that soon. Terrie goes on to look at the top ten companies on the Japanese Web, and to show where SNS giant Mixi fits in. Read it here.

We also think it’s worth mentioning, in the wake of last year’s Technorati report claiming that 37% of blogs are written in Japanese (though Technorati didn’t seem to include Korea in their numbers), that Adam Richards at Mutant Frog Travelogue recently brought our attention to a CNet article reporting that Nifty has discovered that about 40% of blogs written in Japanese are actually spam blogs.

That’s a lot of spam…

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Comments

8 Responses to “Terrie’s take on Japan’s cyberspace; Japan’s spam blogs”

  1. Nick on April 8th, 2008 8:31 am

    I, too, was surprised by the number of Japanese blogs reported, and it’s interesting you mention that 40% are spam. Spam blogs are usually automated and churn out hundreds of posts in a very short time, so whereas 40% of blogs are spam, the percentage of spam posts is probably much, much higher. Of course, that applies to all countries, not just Japan.

  2. Ken Worsley on April 8th, 2008 8:50 am

    Nick, that’s a really good point. The CNet article mentions that spam blogs are often set up with affiliate-type monetization, so they’re basically out there to many money off clickthroughs. They need more eyeballs. The more posts per day the better. I’ve seen some that do 10-15 a day, if not more.

    I’m not sure if this is part of what led WordPress to switch its inbound dashboard links from Technorati to Google Blog Search (and it probably says on the WordPress site somewhere), but Google Blog Search seems to be much, much stricter and very good at evaluating language patterns and finding spam blogs.

    I had been thinking that in 2008 Google was going to unveil something big and new in terms of blogs/blogging and blog search. But thus far, not even a rumor.

  3. John S on April 11th, 2008 12:16 pm

    Does anyone see Mixi as long-term viable? How are they connecting to the next wave of users? The current wave will move on (I call it a ‘wave’ rather than a generation, since it changes so fast), and what will they be left with? Wholesale site redesigns will only alienate users.

  4. Ken Worsley on April 11th, 2008 1:12 pm

    I have to agree there John. SNS sites are built on platforms that are very tied to the time when they were built. Programming and design may be separated, but there are still huge overhaul considerations; it isn’t simply like painting a wall or moving a sofa to make a room look different. Some users are bound to be alienated. I also find the use of Perl on Mixi to be problematic, though others I’m sure won’t. It’s hard to imagine why they haven’t gone with a PHP or Ruby on Rails platform that would seem to be much kinder in terms of server/system resources.

  5. Japanite on April 17th, 2008 6:24 pm

    Regarding spam blogs I think that again the spammers are ahead of Google in the race. Nevertheless, Google has proven before that it has also some smart brains in the company, and I’m sure they are working on ways to minimize the effect of this spam blogs. By the way, personally I hardly encounter any spam blogs in Google search results, so maybe they already have something in the algorithm to eliminate this.

  6. Ken Worsley on April 17th, 2008 8:37 pm

    If anyone’s going to be at the forefront of detecting spam blogs, it will be Google. I’ve speculated before on why WordPress replaced its dashboard inbound link counter with results generated by Google Blog Search rather than Technorati. Technorati, helpful as it may be, seems to make little effort at keeping spam blogs out of its index - probably because it is a popularity contest more than anything else. This means that its rankings might be useful - should spam blogs have an equal probability at linking to all legit blogs - but they are often full of useless links. Google seems to do a better job at filtering out spam blogs from search results. Still, I’d like to have both Google and Technorati results linked to (or better yet, in a widget), since they tend to differ and show different blogs that are linking to you.

  7. Japanite on April 17th, 2008 10:24 pm

    @Ken: Well, now it’s only a matter of getting someone from Google and Someone from Technorati to read this post :)

  8. Ken Worsley on April 18th, 2008 1:44 pm

    Well, now it’s only a matter of getting someone from Google and Someone from Technorati to read this post :)

    Care to see the server logs?

    Better yet, though, someone from WordPress. It’s easy enough to code in your own dashboard and link out to both the Technorati and Google results, but most people probably aren’t going to do it. It’s too bad they swapped one option for the other without offering both, which would have been simple.

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