Blogging and Japan-Newbie Perspective
By Oli
At 8:22 AM · Friday, 14 March · 2003
To Japan · Weblogging
Last year I started to really notice weblogging, and even gave Radio Userland a 1 month spin. I’d been reading Dave Winer’s Scripting News and some other blogs occasionally for a while (a year or two), but hadn’t really ‘caught the bug’. However since I downloaded Ranchero Software’s NetNewsWire I’ve been hooked on blogs. Its got to the stage I have to limit NNW time or I just don’t get anything done ;-)
I love news, and living in Japan has made it harder than normal for me to get it. Even when I do understand the language, Japanese news reporting is somehow .. different to what I’m used to. We recently got Cable TV (MCTV), and I was watching CNN every day for a while, but since getting into RSS I haven’t really bothered. The joy of NNW is I can get both the news (from BBC - even better) and commentary on the news. This is what makes RSS so valuable - a multitude of opinions and positions, rather than the network’s political leaning colouring everything. Reading differing opinions (and discussions in comments) I find I get a balanced overview of an issue. Even better I can get news on stuff that is really interesting to me. CNN’s “a new news, specially made for you” just doesn’t compare.
However the main thing that’s got me really excited is the ability to find like-minded people. I’m getting into web design, and have had a very hard time finding any info in English on web design in Japan. I was beginning to feel very isolated, especially since my Japanese design friends often don’t even know about little things like charsets, let alone which one is better for bilingual pages ;-) I’m now sure that I can find information and meet people doing the web thang in Japan, and that’s a great feeling. Reading Adam Greenfield’s v-2 Organisation site is fantastic.
My main problem with blogging is that reading the news is so interesting yet time-consuming, I’m not doing any posting of my own. Note to self…
Since I’ve got a camera phone, I think I should get into moblogging too - reading about what other people are doing with the web is really energising!
