From: Bettina Anagnostopoulos Date: Thu Jan 30, 2003 05:01:08 Asia/Tokyo To: "'jito@neoteny.com'" Subject: Dayton Ohio Japanese Business Tutor needed

Hello,
I just saw your web site while searching for Japan + Dayton Ohio on google. I hope you may be able to assist me in networking...would you know of professionals who are interested in teaching Japanese to a U.S. executive moving to Tokyo?

Thanks for your help!
Bettina Anagnostopoulos
Senior Language Training Specialist

One amazing phenomenon of blogs is that because of all of the linking going on they end up with fairly high google rankings. At Supernova, Cory of Boing Boing talked about how people email him asking about things he blogs because his blog entries show up on the top of Google results. Also at Supernova, Sergey Brin co-founder of Google talked about how important the ranking and results algorithms were for Google. For instance, first result for "suicide" can have a life or death impact on someone depending on whether it is a page to help you decide not to commit suicide or a page about how to commit suicide. I am the second entry for "Japan + Dayton Ohio" and #3 for "Takenaka media" for instance. At Davos, I talked to Larry Page, co-founder of Google about the phenomenon. I explained that I was very excited that my entry about how the media failed to report the public support of Takenaka showed up before the media reports. I mentioned that maybe it was the way blogs created a lot of pages and linked to each other a lot and how this was giving them unfair juice. Larry said he thought that blogs were getting higher rankings because they were becoming a more important part of the Internet and implied that he felt the high rankings were fair. Cool. I was beginning to feel a bit guilty about the high rankings and worried that Google would "figure it out" and start lowering the rankings for blogs. If Larry says they're fair, I'm assuming they're fair and I don't have to worry about a "correction" in my page ranking.

So, if anyone knows of a good Japanese teacher in Dayton, please send email to Bettina. She gave me permission to post her email...

So people are getting fired for blogging.

The Register

Man sacked for blogging
By Tim Richardson
Posted: 28/01/2003 at 12:11 GMT

A Brit living and working in the US has been sacked from his job for running a blog.

Many of us are criticized for spending time "saving Japan" or blogging instead of working. "How do you have time to blog so much?" people say. Well, I get up at 4am and blog in the morning. I usually eat lunch at my desk and blog. The most important thing is that I have stopped going out drinking with Japanese businessmen. I do dinner, but I find that there is a point of diminishing return after dinner and that drinking and carrying on and calling it businesses is basically crap. If you need to get inebriated to "bond" you've got a psychological problem. (This is my personal opinion.) So, if you took all of the drunken businessmen in the 75,000 bars and restaurants in Tokyo (I saw this figure many years ago in Time Magazine.) and made them go home and blog, the revolution in Japan might happen much more quickly.

If they're not firing you for the time you spend on your blog, then they are firing you for the content of your blog. Remember that "the press" when the US Constitution was written meant individuals with printing presses printing their opinions, not big media companies. Freedom of the press is about the right to blog, not about the rights of some media conglomerate.

Thanks for this link Dirk!

I have had to remove two sets of comments from my blog since I've started. Both of them slandered the people who I wrote about and both were written from fake email addresses. Here is my policy on comments on my blog. Feel free to criticize governments, products, companies or me. Criticism about other people should be written from a verifiable email address and should contain logical arguments about policy, technical or other arguments and positions taken by the person being criticized. Slanderous comments intended to be hurtful rather than constructive will not be tolerated. If you want to post something that might appear slanderous or blow the whistle on something where you feel the fear of retribution, please email me directly. If you can convince me that it is important to get your message out, I will protect your identity and will post the item.

Thank you for your understanding. I was wondering when this was going to start happening...

In Marc's response to my response to Russell Beattie's comments on moblogging he talks about "Shared Reviews servers can house moblogging reports on various resturants, movies, clubs, museums, art galleries and any meatspace location."

So there is another very important part of this "location thing." Servers should be distributed too. You should be able to talk to a local server. A server in your restaurant, billboard, vending machine, car. Local servers can be higher bandwith and can have lots of cool local features. You can leverage things like bluetooth and IR on devices that don't talk location very well. This decentralization is important and relates in a weird way to Dave and Evan's discussions about RSS aggregation. So what if you had RSS aggregators where you had to physically be there to see stuff. You had to be able to physically get into a nightclub before you could see the news feed for what the club members were doing... It sounds backwards to what the Net is about, but I think that there are some applications. It definitely helps on the privacy security issue if certain kinds of information are stored only locally in servers that you trust.

Russell Beattie

I think unless you're a student who's always out and about or a mover and shaker like Joi there's not a whole hell of a lot to moblogging. It's more of an instant online scrapbook than a real communications medium. With blogging there's that level of interactivity which makes it very interesting. I read blogs, I copy permalinks, I write my posts and post links, and I check my referrers for people who linked to me. With moblogging, I take a picture, send off an email and then I'm done. There's nothing else to do - no interaction. Photos don't link. And browsing the web from a 2" x 3" screen is difficult at best. [..] However there's a kernal of an idea there. I don't think it's the equivalent of weblogging, so maybe moblogging isn't the right name for it. But that power of instant communication from your always-on connected wireless device is incredible. Truly "smart mob" stuff. There's going to be a killer app for these devices soon along these lines, we just need to find what it is. I have my doubts whether moblogging - as a mobile version of weblogging - is it.

I guess I would disagree a bit. Moblogging is still in its infancy. (Although Steve Mann has been doing stuff with mobile camera on the web for a long time...)

I think the cameras and the other attributes of the device will get better. Imagine the Sidekick with a built in camera and a color screen. The new Sharp phone has a full VGA color screen! Foma mobile video phones do 384K. So, the dinky sreen, gritty image, thing will be fixed soon.

Although the conversation style of moblogging will probably be different than weblogging, I think you have other ways to thread things.

For example, if you leave messages and images in locations for people. For instance, if you go to a restaurant, you can push a button and it pulls up all of the interesting things people have written while they were there and threads you to other places those people have been. If you're going to a place, you search for people who have moblogged from that location, finding links to their images and maybe their weblogs. In an "augmented reality" (see my brother-in-law Scott Fisher's work on this. He's actually done a system of using mobile phones to annotate space with content.) sort of way, it's like annotating the real world. That's how I look at it. I'm this little thing crawling around the earth, annotating it with images, sounds and text. You leverage being mobile by being able to add location. This database can be viewed by time/location/ID and we can create meta information from that. (Yes, there are security/privacy issues.)