Nico Nico Jikkyo (Jikkyo originally means "live state" in Japanese, but in this case, abbreviated form of Jikkyo-Chukei, "play-by-play broadcasting") is a newly introduced service by Dwango, who runs Japan's most popular online video service Nico Nico Douga.

Nico Nico Jikkyo introduced a client application for Windows, which shows the similar layout with Nico Nico Douga, left-side video area and user comments flow over the video. The big difference is, the left box does not show anything but it is completely transparent to the background Windows desktop level.

By this, users can use their own TV tuner unit on their PC to show TV programme, and scale the Nico Nico Jikkyo application to fit to the background TV image.

Users realtime comments are collected on the server side and shown to other TV watchers, so users can talk on current broadcasting with many others over the internet.

In Japan, ground-based TV broadcasting still dominates what people watch everyday. Although there are satellite and cable choices, such paid channels are not widely watched as same as in USA.

One of the most active bulletin boards on the massive anonymous BBS 2-channel are 7 Jikkyo-Ita (live TV watchers thread) for Kanto region's 7 channels. For example, Jikkyo-Ita for NHK, national channel, has now its No.48621 thread, which means there have been about 48,621,000 comments in their 10 years history. It is said that one hour program gets 100 to few thousands comments (depends on channel and programme popularity, of course) there.

So, everyone knows that talking over the TV programme could be a great consumer generated media, and besides 2-channel Jikkyo-Ita, there have been many attempts to create those chatters community on the web.

The biggest obstacle is copyright. There is not many move from TV networks side to the web integration except few challenges on Nico Nico Douga/YouTube/etc. In Japan, traditional media keeps rather hostile attitude against the net so there is no Hulu-like services existing yet.

This Nico Nico Jikkyo, seems carefully to avoid the copyright infringement with TV networks, but combining two very successful web services came from the single person, the 2 channel founder and the guy behind Nico Nico Douga, Hiroyuki Nishimura (aka Hiroyuki).

Tags: Japan, New Service by Akky Akimoto
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Hiroyuki Nishibuya, founder of Japan's biggest anonymous BBS 2ch.net (Ni-Channel), revealed that he had transferred the ownership of 2ch.net to oversea on his blog.

The FAQ on 2ch.net was modified, too.

Q Who owns 2ch?

A 2ch.net is managed and operated by PACKET MONSTER INC.

2ch.net has been at the heart of libel lawsuits in decade since it established in 1999. Those lawsuits targeted at Hiroyuki as individual, and freedom of speech on 2ch.net has been somewhat kept by his attitude to emphasis those suing people getting more and more attentions from 2ch users.

The tribuneship of 2ch is now handed to a company PACKET MONSTER INC., which looks in Singapore. I think this is to avoid farther suits by removing the existence of the service from Japan, i.e. Hiroyuki still owns the service via the paper company. The servers of 2ch is always explained to be run in USA from its beginning. Now it becomes much more complicated to take legal action to 2ch.net in Japan.

Tags: Japan, News, Singapore by Akky Akimoto
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In Japan, 2channel (2ch) is the biggest anonymous online forum, and they are very notorious for its unregulated contents.

Hatsugen komachi (Komachi) is another huge anonymous online forum with 100 million page views per month. Komachi is operated by the world's largest newspaper company Yomiuri-shimbun. Unlike 2ch, it's moderated by operators. Still words are not very gentle.

Komachi is very differently marketed from 2channel. Hatsugen komachi is a part of Oote komachi, a life-style portal site for women. Komachi successfully obtained ads from big companies.

Komachi has 3000 posts per day. In most posts, people discharges her/his personal experience, problem with family, or emotion. Then other people give them a some kind of advice or blames.

Example of posts:

* My 61 years old daddy is going to travel with a woman, and he kept it secret to my mother. Should I talk it to mom, or not?

* In my childhood, my mom told me that my neighbour described me as a 'very ugly baby'. Now I'm in my 30s, but still I can't overcome that word.

* My husband is an Otaku, and has many robot toys. I can't bear it, so I discarded all those garbages while he's working. We fought over it when he came back home. Getting mad by discarding toys, what a childish person he is? How can I make him regret? Give me advices! (She got lots of blaming replies)

(Please note it's a very brief translation.)

Tags: Japan, Service by Shunichi Arai
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This is the second part of our coverage of the Asiajin meeting #1 which took part this Tuesday.

Presentation No. 4

"The 4th presenter abused the meeting by violating its regulation of not speaking in one's mother tongue against agreement. Thus we do not cover the presentation. You may find the information somewhere else. (Akky AKIMOTO)"

Presentation No. 5
("Ememo - not a web application but an email application")

Daisuke Furukawa -who is a freelance web developer- spoke about a product he developed by himself called ememo. Ememo is basically an electronic account book, mainly for private use. Daisuke coded the application for use with mobile phones in particular.

Here is how it works:

Users just write a mail to me@ememo.jp stating what they bought by how much. Ememo automatically lists all items, calculates the prices and also shows the amount of money you spent in a given time frame! The interface is that simple.

It's free and very easy to use, so please check ememo out. If you would like to cancel the service, you can do so by mailing the word "UNDO" to the address above.

Ememo was launched in October last year. You can access the slides of Daisuke's presentation here.

Presentation No. 6
("How to live like Japanese in ?")

"Yoski" Yosuke Akamatsu's performance made the audience laugh constantly. Yoski is a president of sidefeed, a "feed" technologies provider (seven of sidefeed's 14 services are available also in English. One of those services is ranked in 24th [J] by traffic in Japan.), but his talk was nothing about his company this time.

In his ironic presentation (which he didn't hold on his company's behalf), Yoski pointed out some of the various cultural differences he came across when thinking about Japan's popular and geeky social portal service Hatena.

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According to Yoski, Hatena hosts a lot of particularly enthusiastic users. In his view, Hatena is more "Web 2.0"-like than Yahoo! Japan or 2ch, the wildly popular BBS. He went on explaining Japanese terms like "ota", "wabi" or "moe" and how they can be linked to this country's unique Internet culture.

You had to be there to understand Yoski's jokes!

Presentation No. 7
("Differences between Japanese and American web communities")

"Kensuu" (who has the cool title of "HeadPresident and Manager of 3rd creative division", rocketstart) delivered another presentation focusing on cultural issues. He talked about differences in user behavior when participating in web communities in particular. He has been a community expert who managed popular forum services for youth. He recently published a Japanese book "Web community de ichiban taisetsu na koto"("The most important thing on Web community").

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Kensuu's two key points were:

The Japanese see members in online communities as a cohesive unit which they can blend into and become a part of. On the contrary, Western users tend to keep and stress their own identity and individuality in such a case.

Kensuu also said Japanese people like to "read" and enjoy the overall atmosphere in web communities, explaining why names are not important to them.

The aftermath

Amazingly, almost all participants of Asiajin Meeting #1 went to the following Nijikai (a kind of post-event get-together Japanese style). This was a pleasant surprise and a first for me to see!

Thank you very much to all the presenters, guests, viewers and Andrew Shuttleworth for his great job with the livecast.

Be sure to join us for Asiajin Meeting Tokyo #2 (coming soon)!

Tags: Community, Event Report, Japan by Serkan Toto
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