Archive for September, 2008
Firefly - the novel
On September 30, 2008 in On the J-web, fun
One of my favourite Japan stories is Firefly at your-japan.com’s “saga”
A post over at the JapanSoc blog reminded me of it so I went again to his site and noticed that he has released a prequel to his Japan novel (Firefly wants to publish a book).
It’s available for free download: Firefly Short Novel - The Prequel
Let’s hope Firefly realises his dream of being published. He can tell a good story!
But don’t take my word for it, read his “The worst language mistake in history”
And have a great day
DailyJ
Supporting JapanSoc
On September 29, 2008 in Announcements, Blog Improvements, Community building, DailyJ Mission, Future of the J-web, Helping Japan Bloggers
Just a quick but important post today.
I (finally) put up a JapanSoc widget on DailyJ to help spread the idea of JapanSoc and a J-blogger community.
on the bottom of it you can click “get widget” and get one for your site. Go for it!
and check out the Jsoc toolbox
Let’s support our community-driven Japan-related news source.
fixing the homepage. working on chat
On September 28, 2008 in Announcements, Blog Improvements
I am 89% sure I fixed the nipponster homepage this time. Thanks Nick for telling me about the problem.
I am also working on an “interview chat” section for DailyJ using prologue theme for wordpress (the theme was another Nick suggestion).
It will be a place to talk about interviews (yay! that explains it). ok, I will explain it better later.
Japanlabs @ JapanLabs.org
On September 27, 2008 in Announcements, JapanLabs
(slow news day 
. actually I am busy with little projects here and there)
I bought the domain name JapanLabs.org to use for the JapanLabs social network over at ning.com.
Japanlabs.org has been set to redirect there so you can use that. Seems easier than entering japanlabs.ning.com
Nipponster Web Search Widget. and Video Search Widget
On September 26, 2008 in Announcements, On the J-web, fun
For anyone interested, there are some new widgets for you on Nipponster. I removed the logo off of the top of the widget code so that you can label them as you like.
The goal is to give you a widget that gives your readers/users Japan-specific search results. As always I am all ears for you feedback. Let me know what you think!
The old one looked like this (with the Nipponster branding on it):
The new web search widget:
Here’s the code:
And here is the video search widget
Here is the code:
Relationships: the glue of the j-web. And a widget
On September 25, 2008 in Announcements, Blog Improvements, Community building, fun
Some months ago I posted about an RSS feed of posts by past DailyJ interviewees.
And I posted script for widget so that others could put it on their blogs, etc., if they wanted to.
Chris from Waikiki2Yanai mentioned that the widget’s colour didn’t match his site, so I’ve made a new one (finally!) that is clear.
I wanted to make it into a widgetbox widget but widgetbox is not as easy as they claim.
Anyway, here it is:
And here is the code for it:
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://www.google.com/reader/ui/publisher-en.js”></script>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://www.google.com/reader/public/javascript/user/01310610213837056251/label/Daily J?n=5&callback=GRC_p(%7Bc%3A%22-%22%2Ct%3A%22%22%2Cs%3A%22true%22%2Cb%3A%22false%22%7D)%3Bnew%20GRC”></script>
Also I added it to the left-hand sidebar.
Jim Breen. Japan-related tools
On September 24, 2008 in Nerd Rant, On the J-web, Resources
Warning: Nerdy content to follow
Hopefully, you know who that man in the title is. Yes, I am going on another rant about Jim Breen.
To me, he is one of the most interesting characters on the J-web.
His was one of the first Japan-related websites I ever visited (all of my Japanese teachers recommended him). And his wwwjdic (J/E dictionary) and Japanese page are two of my favourite www resources.
But more than that, I love his interest in Japan-related tools.
I think that tools have been overlooked some lately on the J-web (Nihonhacks’ post about rikaichan is a pleasant exception). Or maybe they are just taking new forms (like JapanSoc as an example of a tool). Either way, I am excited to see what tools we dream up next.
Anyway (before I get off topic here), what I really want to mention are some interesting articles and lecture notes from Jim Breen’s past classes at Monash University.
Two of my favourite subjects are Japan and computer technology (especially web tech). I would have loved to have taken one of Jim’s classes!
There is an archive of Jim Breen’s papers. Now these are some high quality Japan-related web rants!
I found a few interesting ones that the nerds amongst us might also like (see the end of this post), but I will only highlight one. It relates some to Nipponster and the way Japan-related information (and information in Japanese) is organised and searched.
WWW Search Engines and Japanese Text
An interesting quote from the article:
“…it is known that both Google and Yahoo use Basis Technology Corp’s Rosette Language Analyzer software”
I had never heard of that software. I know that Google is currently working on one of the largest translation software projects in history. It will be interesting to see what this technology brings about. I wonder who at Google Japan is in charge of this type of research and what they have to say about it.
What do you think about all of this? I always look forward to seeing what others have to say about these things, so please comment!
And have a great day,
DailyJ
p.s. Koichi has a good post about using Jim Breen’s Japanese dictionary on the iphone.
p.p.s. More interesting Jim Breen articles:
Japanese translation and the computer - the past, the present and the future
Computing in Japanese; what are the frontiers now?
81 To Dos and Feeling Good
On September 22, 2008 in Announcements
(Just a quick post today as I work on some other upcoming things.)
About two weeks ago I posted about being tired.
I think I had forgotten how much fun DailyJ can be; how much fun it is to talk to others on the Japan-related web and hear about what motivates them.
Looking back over the year cured me of that. Even I cannot believe that DailyJ interviewed 21 sites last year! It was a great experience.
There is much for me to do for DailyJ and Nipponster. I have a long list of to do items (really mini & major projects). Right now I have 81 items on my list! But they are all exiting things. I can’t wait to roll them out!
-DailyJ
p.s. I am getting better at managing things, I take my gmail inbox down to zero every week now (for the last three weeks). See inbox zero
Some tidying
On September 21, 2008 in Blog Improvements
I’ve been tidying up DailyJ a little.
I’ve added a link “the interviews” to the top of the blog. It is for listing all the interviews to date.
And I added Trans-Pacific Radio, JapanItUp, and Jim Breen to the interviewee roll on the right sidebar.
Hopefully this makes things a little easier to find.
In the near future I hope to overhaul DailyJ but until then baby steps.
Web 2.0 expo, in Tokyo
On September 20, 2008 in Announcements, Resources, fun
The webmaster over at altsearchengines.com sent me an email about the Tokyo Web 2.0 Expo.
It looks interesting.
