six apart

Went with Nobu to see Nob Seki of Six Apart speak about blogs. Six Apart is probably best known for their tool Movable Type, and their recent purchase of the popular LiveJournal service.

It was an interesting talk. Seki presented statistics from several studies regarding the current status of the blogging industry and the anticipated market. I found the data gathering methods pretty interesting. In one study, they surveyed a sample size and extrapolated the results to the entire population. Another study looked at ping counts from existing blogs and used that to estimate the total number of blogs in Japan.

I think the current popularity of blogs is a reminder that good tools are always going to be useful, and they may drive interesting innovations in unexpected areas. Essentially web presence is really cheap and there are a lot of opportunities to use that.

the world wide web owner

I got a bit of spam from "World Wide Web Owner" today. I wonder if this person can stop all the spam polluting his/her www. Laf. I have quite a few claims to make. And all this credit card and identity theft. Obviously a lot of stuff this person has to account for.

content management systems

I just read an interesting column on common reasons why content management systems fail.

Also, a column on why giving the customer power will make a site successful. Rather interesting. I was really irritated when ofoto.com started requiring periodic purchases in order to maintain my account there. I think Netflix is great. The killer feature is having no late fees, but I also like the huge selection.

Of course, I don't own a dvd player. heh.

web sites and the surfing experience

There is very little that is more frustrating than not being able to find what you want. There are many reasons why you may not be able to find what you're looking for, but one reason should not be that the web site search functionality is broken.

In that respect, Yodobashi fails miserably compared to Bic Camera. At Bic Camera's site, I typed into the search bar the name of the game I was looking for and hit enter. Done. All found. At Yodbashi, I typed in the name of the game and hit enter, and got a Yodobashi page with no message text; just the regular default menu bar and copyright footers. Very informative. I didn't even know if the search found anything; as far as I know the site hit a bug while trying to search. I tried browsing and after clicking through 10 pages actually found the game I was looking for, but searching for it gave me a blank page or no results, at various times. I went back to the site after 20 minutes and the search finally worked properly. I guess the site was broken.

Japanese post: new vocab

くじける 挫ける: be discouraged; be disheartened

Kind of a negative word, but seems useful.
くじけちゃいけないよ: don't be discouraged.

Japanese

I calculated and I've studied Japanese for at least 5 years.
2 years in college, 1 1/2 years or so in CA, and 2 years in Japan.

Congratulations Venus!

Venus just won Wimbledon! Woohoo!