Blogs in Japan

I have seen reports that the number of blogs in Japan totalled 3.35 million at the end of March 2005, and that about 16.51 million people visit blogs at least once a month. Blog provider Hatena Co is stating that they are currently signing up 10,000 new bloggers a month. According to Mainichi Shimbun, Japan's biggest providers of free blogging services include Yahoo Japan and Rakuten, but most popular is Livedoor.

Livedoor has a reputation as paradise for Japan's eroggers. That is a new word for people with an Erog (Erotic blog). Do a google search on the word "erog" and see what you find!

Actually the blog trend was faster in Korea than in Japan. For example, Yahoo Japan's blogging site uses technology from Yahoo Korea's blog site, launched there in late 2003. But other than the technology back end, the systems are independent. Funnily enough, the US Yahoo still has not launched any blog service!

Korea’s top five most popular portals are Naver, Daum, Nate, Yahoo Korea and Paran, and all of them have blog services that have beomce really popular.

Blogs in Japan actually have a predecessor called 2 Channel. Syberpunk writes that it is one of the largest Message Boards in the world, and the most popular website in Japan. 2 Channel or (Pronounced "nee-channel") is the "keijiban" or king of all message boards in Japan. It's owner/founder/operator Hiroyuki Nishimura began the site on May 30th 1999. 2ch handles 1 million posts a day, 20 million thread views per day, 600 million page impressions per month and has over 200 topics for discussion ranging from "hacking to today's dinner".

Click here to read about 2 Channel!