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The Japan-related Web: The Future
On February 06, 2008 in #The Japan-related Web Debate, Future of the J-web, Helping Japan Bloggers
| If you are just joining us, Bill from Rising Sun Of Nihon has invited me to use his blog as a platform where we can all come together and discuss the Japan-related web! |
For the last few posts of the Japan-related web series I mention three web projects that I think are leveraging innovative web technology to build community and help webmasters/bloggers.
#1 Japanopedia
#2 Japan-Hopper
#3 JapanSoc
Number 1 and number 3 have been mentioned before on DailyJ (and I will be talking about them more later). Right now I want to talk a little bit about number 2 and then an idea about how all three can work together.
Japan-Hopper.com:
I contacted Kiyotaka, the owner of Japan-Hopper, and asked him a little bit about the project (there will also be a full interview with him later here on DailyJ). You can read what he said in the original article. Basically Japan-Hopper is a site where anyone can add a “placemark” (some info about a location) on a map of Japan.
The great thing about it is that it is perfect for you if you are a Japan-blogger and you have posts about specific places in Japan. You can take a snippet or a summary of your post, add it to Japan-Hopper as a placemark, and add a link back to the full post on your site! Extra traffic.
Now my idea, and it is just an idea (i.e. don’t kill me if you don’t like it)
JapanSoc, Japan-Hopper and Japanopedia if used together could amplify the community building work and send even more traffic to blogs. Here is my thinking:
Japanopedia is like a blank open slate. Anyone can start a project there. Currently there is a project on it to help JapanSoc. A similar project could be made for Japan-Hopper. Maybe a project for bloggers to talk about their favourite places in Japan. Or maybe a project to add screenshots of Japanese monuments on SecondLife to the right places for them on JapanHopper. What do you think about that?
Whatever the case, once it is on Japan-Hopper maybe then it could be highlighted on JapanSoc! You could take your Japan-Hopper placemark’s address and submit it to JapanSoc. If it is interesting and gets “soc’ed” you get exposure for your post on two sites! And you support both projects at the same time.
Of course I am not advocating spamming either site with worthless junk, so I hope you make your contributions meaningful. And have fun too!
Last words?
Tomorrow the last post of the Japan-related web series on RisingSunOfNihon will be posted. But it’s my hope that this series is just the beginning.
As always, I am eager to hear what you think. So let me know!
And have a great day
When lord…will a site be made that is teacher friendly?
All the forums are littered with flamers and snobs. The Soc is great but not for English teachers.
If you didn’t know it you would think none of these people teach? Do they?
What is it like to get paid to do a job and NOT want to be the best? I must be extremely competitive because I can’t even imagine not wanting to be #1??
@Chris
You are definitely passionate about what you do and should really consider starting some sort of site that does what you are asking. You can’t be the only one who wants this and could probably get a good start with some of the innovative lesson ideas that you already share on your blog.
Now don’t shoot me - this is a friendly comment - I think that some of your ideas are great but when I read your blog it feels more like it is your way to communicate with or encourage your students and their parents than a way to start a discussion with other English teachers. I’m not an English teacher but that’s my impression and maybe I am not alone?
It’s just a thought….
@Shane, I would never get bunched-up over a well written criticism.
I appreciate it
(This is why the bury button bothers me. Instead of Deas (for example) being a self appointed “Soc janitor” and going around hitting the bury button he and others should at least point out to the poster why they are doing it.)
You are right. The Blog is pointed at my students and if I want to interest anyone else I should keep that in mind when I’m writing posts!
Thanks for being honest.
[...] February 07, 2008 in Community building, On the J-web Chris B Said,When lord…will a site be made that is teacher friendly? All the forums are littered with flamers [...]
You’re welcome Chris! Maybe while it’s still cold and you are stuck inside you could get started on that other site and maybe even create a forum too!
I wouldn’t be participating much but I would applaud the effort!
Just a quick note here to say I talked to Deas and he agreed to lay off the bury button. Just so you know.
@Chemist,
My first impression of Japan Hopper was that it was nothing more than a map. Looking again however, I can see that it’s been around for a couple of years and has a big archive of articles attached to placemarks. This would no doubt be useful to people coming to visit Japan, and I might put an article or two on it myself at some point.
I appreciate you setting up the JapanSoc project on Japanopedia, but the project that really needs work is Japanopedia itself. We talked before about changing the template/theme/skin, but what about the content? If you click the “Random page” link, you almost always get empty pages. These seem to be pages you’ve added yourself to build up a directory of Japan-related sites, but without any content they make the site look dead. Have you contacted the authors of the sites you’re making pages for to see if they’ll come and write something?
What you need on the front page is some examples of the better, fuller, pages that exist on Japanopedia, e.g. my JapanSoc page
These should encourage people to write pages for their own sites.
Chris, you’re guilty of a content-less Japanopedia page, too! One line? Come on, you can do better than that.
For reference, here’s my JapanSoc page on Japanopedia.
That looks good Nick!!
I have to get my azz in gear
@Nick
Currently Japan-hopper is paying people for articles (articles not placemarks, I think). I cannot imagine it could afford to do that for long though.
Great feedback about Japanopedia. I didn’t think about how those blank pages might look to new comers. That is a very good point.
Highlighting well built pages on the main page seems like a perfect way to fix that problem.
I have to get my jazz in gear too
Wow, I see that now. 1,000-2,000 yen and more if you include a nice photo. I think a lot of people would take up that offer if they knew about it. I’ve outsourced article writing for as little as $6 for 500+ words for one of my projects, perhaps you could consider it for Japanopedia to help get the site off the ground. $600 would get you a hundred pages of site reviews. Just a thought.
@Chris
About Shane’s idea.
I’m not sure if you wanted to start your own thing or not but here are some options if you do.
If you wanted to start a forum related to English Teaching there are hosted forums available that might remove a bit of the hassle of maintaining a forum yourself.
Http://proboards.com is one that I know of.
The con of having someone else host it would be that you might lose a bit of the creative control you would otherwise have and if you get free hosting they put ads on your user pages (the profile pages I think).
To host something yourself is not that difficult either so it might be a better route (but that depends on your web experience). If you have a webhost that provides you with cPanel, that cPanel might have Fantastico (which is fantastic!). Fantastico auto installs forums for you (its about three clicks to install
).
One of the forums available is phpBB, which I’ve used in the past and is not too hard to work with. If you have fantastico you could have a forum up in a day. Then you would have to customise it, and there are tutorials on that.
In my (limited) experience, forums can be difficult to start not because of the tech work but because they lack members. You will have an uphill battle going out and pulling in users.
There are actually services available where you can buy posts. These services pay people to post on forums (usually “seed” posts to start the forum) so that they don’t look dead. But you are looking for very specific users so I am not sure these would work for you, even as just a jump start.
So your best bet might be finding people on other forums who are not the flammers and snobs you mention and coaxing them over to your forum with a private message (”hi, tired of these of these n00bs? I have a solution…”). Is that kosher? Should I be recommending it? I don’t know.
Anyway, just some ideas off the top of my head in case you were thinking about it. Hope they were helpful.
@Nick
The Japan-hopper offer is really good. I am not sure how they are affording that.
btw, nice post about them (for others reading this, here is the post)
I don’t want to pay for articles for Japanopedia. Thanks for the suggestion though.
Japanopedia is not mine really and I will not make anything from it so I don’t want to spend money if I can promote it without. That is not to say that I do not want the project to be a success. I definitely do!
I hope that doesn’t sound blunt. I am always open to any suggestions
Re: “Japanopedia is not mine”
In that case, can I have it?
@ Nick
I’d sell it to you but it’s priceless.
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