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Tired
On September 04, 2008 in DailyJ Mission, Suggestions Please
I am worn out today.
So this post might be less than inspired.
I have been thinking a lot about DailyJ and Nipponster and the other sites on the J-web.
I feel like I am losing focus. Or maybe the need that DailyJ was originally created to fill, is no longer important.
I don’t know.
When I created my first Japan-related website (now defunct) back in 2003 I wanted to create a website that would help people interested in studying at universities in Japan (foreign students).
It was supposed to be a site where current students could submit stories about their experiences. Then interested students could learn about student life in Japan from them.
It failed, the site I built after it failed, and the social networking site I built after that failed (but gave birth to Nipponster).
I learnt a lot from each of those failures, so maybe I am becoming more savvy.
On the other hand maybe I am not really adequately solving problems/ meeting needs.
hmmm…
Right, let’s see…
Part 1:
what you think are failures may have inspired others. For example…
I was given a boost when you showed me your old Pligg site. It was nice to know that there was someone else in this circle of Japan bloggers that knew what Pligg was and had given it a go. Someone who would understand what I was talking about!
You inspired me to make a video tutorial. That was a good experience for me and I wouldn’t have done it without the nudge you gave me.
I would still have no idea how wikis work if you hadn’t encouraged me to get involved with Japanopedia.
You got me using the Nipponster toolbar.
Your efforts to revive the Japan Blog Matsuri inspired me to do so.
Your work on the Japan Blog List and Nipponster inspired my Japan Blog Big RSS Feed page.
Besides Mixi, Japan Labs was my first real introduction to a social networking platform.
Anyway, as you can see. I’ve got a lot of inspiration from you, Tori, so your “failures” haven’t just been learning experiences for you, they been learning experiences for me, too!
Part 2:
You said you might not be adequately solving problems or meeting needs. Unless you’re in it for a profit, which I don’t think you are, maybe it’s not important to solve problems or meet the needs of a whole group of people.
I recently posted a bug fix on my blog and got comments from a couple of people thanking me for helping them. That made me feel really good. We all like to get attention and receive praise. It makes us feel good. By nature, the most important thing in our lives is ourselves, and we like to hear things that make us feel important.
With that in mind, you can “meet the needs” of Japan bloggers (or anybody for that matter) by making them feel important, and being sincere about it in the process. Here are a few things that bloggers like:
- receiving positive comments on their blog posts
- being linked to or mentioned in a positive context on another blog.
- having a post dugg, stumbled, soc’ed or otherwise shared without needing to ask for it.
- getting new subscribers
- getting added to someone’s blogroll
- being followed on Twitter
Etc. All these things make bloggers feel good about themselves. Now, this is just a suggestion, but it’s really very similar to what the Daily J has always been about - community building:
Everyday, make an effort to do one of the things listed above, and on the Daily J, write a quick paragraph about why you did it. So, if you stumbled someone’s article, tell your Daily J readers about it. The person who got the Daily J “Stumble, Backlink, and Recommendation” package will be buzzing all day… because you made them feel important.
Do that with five different J-bloggers per week and you’ll have indirectly affected each of those bloggers in a positive way. As you do this week after week, your actions will have given the whole community a boost, and if you’re lucky, your generosity will rub off on others who may feel energized to be more active in the community themselves.
And you can do all this in just five minutes a day!
Nick,
Thank you for all of your kinds words. I really am grateful to you for them.
I am glad that I have been helpful. I think that DailyJ did open up new dialogue and helped catalyse many new ideas.
In that case I am very satisfied with everything I have tried to do. I do not regret having started it at all.
But I have worked hard. And others have worked hard. And projects have been set in motion that are accomplishing all that I had hoped would come about.
For example, I am extremely happy to have found a platform that works for the JapanLabs idea. I don’t expect (or want) it to “take off” and have a huge user base, it is something for a very specific group of people. And it makes me happy.
Another example is JapanSoc. It was exactly the right project at the right time and the perfect answer to everything I was discussing(/calling for perhaps) about community. The effort that we’ve all put into it has born fruit, the J-web has its Digg. It is a great accomplishment and one that is still in the making.
DailyJ was a good predecessor, a good catalyst, for the things happening on the j-web now. But I cannot help but feel like it has fulfilled its purpose and it is time for it to ride off into the sunset and let others run with the baton.
My point, which I’ve done a bad job of explaining so far, is that I am at (what at least in mind seems like) a major decision making point.
I love DailyJ. I love the concept and everything I’ve done so far. And I desperately want it to stay true to everything that I’ve done with it and its focus / mission.
At the same time, I want to move on. I want to focus again on projects like Nipponster and the toolbar. I want to make them useful. I want to have the time to contribute to JapanSoc, and Japan-hopper, suggest hacks to NihonHacks, comment on blogs, and do other things.
Now it might seem that those things go hand in hand with DailyJ. But focusing so much on those things here on DailyJ I think actually compromises one of the most fundamental purposes of DailyJ. That purpose is to conduct interviews with the people behind Japan-related websites. That is the focus. Talking about whatever pleases me at the moment isn’t true to that.
The problem is that I just do not have the time to do all of this and do it at the level of quality that I think it deserves.
So do I abandon interviewing? Do I do less interviews? Can I not post once a day and call it DailyJ?
Can I post useless filler or whatever I fancy and still feel good about what I am doing?
I’ve created a time-sink that I cannot manage.
But it is a time-sink that I love.
And it is blog that seems to have a life (and focus) of its own and I cannot bare to compromise that. I cannot change it to suit my needs. It deserves to be the way it is. But I’m not able to keep running it that way
(I wonder if that sounds sane, or even makes sense… either way, it is how I feel).
So I have a dilemma (real or imagined). Let’s hope I find the solution and get over this.
I think your part 2 is spot on and is so much of what Daily is and should be about. And perhaps it is manageable too.
On the other hand, I have been thinking about the possibility of giving DailyJ away to whomever will take good care of it and keep it true to its purpose.
*sigh*
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