Gen Kanai, Technorati - on blogs and design

8 Aug 2005 Category: Features, Internet, Japan, Technology

Gen Kanai, Technorati - on blogs and design

Gen Kanai, Technorati

Gen Kanai is the Strategic Planning Manager of Technorati Japan, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Digital Garage providing weblog-specific search services in the Japan market. Gen has been blogging for over 5 years and has been on the Internet since 1991. As a member of the Technorati team and an avid blogger himself, Gen sees hundreds of “blog”-style sites a day. What makes for a good blog?

Interview by Jon

The number of blogs on the internet has exploded in the last few years. Along with this dramatic increase in popularity, it has been easy to see that the majority of blogs adopt very similar designs - say, 2-column or 3-column, centered in the user’s browser. The style has become so ubiquitous that in the web design industry now, designers are often wary of not making their new projects look too “blog-like”. Would you say that for blogs, defaulting to this 2-column or 3-column design ethos is a good or bad thing?

The number of weblogs is exploding. Technorati is tracking over 14 million blogs worldwide as of July 2005. The Japanese government reported 3.3 million Japanese blogs as of April 2005.


Gen Kanai

While it is true that blogs have generally been designed with 2 or 3 columns, I think the format of the blog is less important than the content. It is more important to have quality content and recent updates.

I think people tolerate basic or default templates as long as the content is compelling or interesting. However, having a customized or original design is a strong differentiator and can significantly help your blog stand out from the millions of others. So design is very important, but I would put it second to the content.

14 million blogs! Impressive. Blogs seem to have shaken off the slightly negative stigma that was attached to the phenomenon in the beginning (”Blogs? It’s all about what people ate last night for dinner, right?”) - what do you think has contributed to this, and do you think this huge number of blogs is changing the way people use the internet?


kottke.org is one of the most popular blogs on the internet

The bibologu (notebook-style i.e. write about anything) is common in Japan and in the US - this is one of the best uses of a blog. Jason Kottke, who runs one of the most popular blogs, calls his blog “my outboard brain” and that’s a great way to use a blog.

I think the reason that there are still many diary-style blogs in Japan is because there is a long history of diary-keeping in the Japanese culture for many hundreds of years. So there’s a significant cultural reason behind the diary-style blogs in Japan.

There’s room for all kinds of blogs in Japan, diary-style as well as bibolog as well as more niche content blogs, podcasts, videoblogs, mobile/keitai blogs, etc.

The high penetration of broadband and 3G mobile phones in Japan means that the infrastructure is in place for the growth of consumer-generated media.

I do think there are aspects of Japanese culture that make the Japanese Internet usage different from the US, European or S. Korean Internet usage, but I’m convinced that there will be as many people creating their own content with blogs and other personal publishing tools as there are in other nations with similar computer and Internet usage profiles.

I suppose it is fair to say that once a blog gains in popularity, people tend to “evolve” up from using default templates and create a unique look, running off a more bespoke version of whatever publishing platform they are using. Looking at these more popular sites, do you see any trends with regards to design style and the kind of technology applied?

If anything I am seeing a trend towards more complexity with more mature blogs. People tend to want to test out sidebar items, affiliate promotion services, advertising services, etc. which seem to end up cluttering up most weblogs.

Blogs tend to make great use of emerging or new technologies (which the bigger web entities like Yahoo then adopt a few years down the line) - what are some of the more interesting web technologies applicable to weblogs that have interested you lately?


Flickr - photo storage and sharing. Users can browse photos via user-defined “tags” to find related photos

The two services that have really affected blogging in the past year have been the social bookmark sharing service del.icio.us, and the social photography sharing service, flickr.

Both have effectively leveraged their user base to make their services much more interesting for their users than traditional bookmark services or traditional photo gallery services.

Both also have application programming interfaces (APIs) which allow bloggers to have their own flickr and del.icio.us data on their own blogs- a valuable differentiation from most other services.

Another technology that is still very raw but has a lot of potential is greasemonkey, which is an extension to Mozilla’s Firefox browser and allows for “user scripts” (DHTML) to alter the content and behavior of any website, including weblogs, through user scripts which work inside the browser. It allows a user to “remix” websites, and “customize” them beyond the original website’s design.

If other browser providers are smart, they’ll be sure to allow users to build greasemonkey-like scripts for their own browsers (IE7, Safari, Opera, etc.), as this may become a key differentiator for Firefox.

Why do you think these kinds of social web applications work so well? Are we all just lonely, bored individuals who’ll look at anything on the internet, or has the internet just become far too BIG for you to experience it all without a helping hand?

The best online social services, and often the most popular ones, have a few things in common:

  • “you get more than what you give” (which is to say that the site gives the user a greater perceived return than the amount of effort they invest)

  • a real community created by the users for the users (easy to say, very hard to do organically)

  • a significantly more efficient process (i.e. ecommerce or price comparison services)

  • making something easy that before was very hard (i.e. auctions or classifieds, or search engines, or online dating services, etc.)

Going back to design - as someone who has been blogging for a while now, have you noticed any aspects of blog design that have vanished over the years? Marquee tags? (tongue in cheek)

Clearly one of the biggest differences between web design in 2005 vs. even in 2000 is the decline in use of tables. There are still some reasons to use tables for certain kinds of sites, but the vast majority of websites will benefit from an XHTML/CSS presentation. CSS is very important for many reasons, not the least of which is the separation of design from content/functionality, among many other benefits. Sadly, I see many, many, Japanese websites that are still tables-based.

Blogs and other information-based sites such as news websites go hand-in-hand with RSS feeds nowadays. What are your views on advertising in RSS feeds? Does that not defeat the purpose of RSS (i.e. simple, quick syndication of things we are interested in)?


http://kanai.net/weblog/

I should explain that I do not make any money from my blog. I do not plan to. I don’t have any advertising on my site, nor any affiliate ecommerce links. I have no goal to make any money from my blog.

Here’s why I think advertising in RSS feeds of personal blogs is a bad idea at this time. Until RSS becomes more popular, the people reading your RSS feed are your core audience- your loyal readers. Would you rather force ads upon your loyal readers or random people who might visit your weblog (i.e. AdSense on your weblog)?

If you have a corporate blog or are clearly making money from your blog via advertising (i.e. if that is the goal of the blog)- this advice does not apply.

What do you see in the future for blogging? Is it all going to end in a big bang?

It is clear to me that weblogs are not just a passing fad and while they may mutate into something else, this culture of “consumer-generated media” (including podcasts and videoblogs, etc.) and “personal publishing” will be an important part of the web for many years to come.

Finally, if you could recommend us something to look at, that would be great. How about 3 blogs that you feel are strong on content (Japanese or English) and 3 blogs that you feel are “beautiful” in terms of design (any language).

3 good content blogs

3 good design blogs

Jeremy Hedley’s Antipixel

Douglas Bowman’s Stopdesign

Dave Shea’s mezzoblue

Finally, I’d like to promote two sites that should be very useful for your audience.

The first is not a blog but I am very excited to promote this wonderful, free, bi-lingual, event information service for art lovers in Tokyo:

The second is my company, which provides weblog search services in Japanese and English. If you want to know what is being discussed on weblogs in Japan, Technorati is the place to do your search:

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