Niconico douga, the 2007 biggest hit in Japanese web, is a video sharing community service with enhanced overlay comments feature.
Although it is popular among Japanese users, there are not many non-Japanese videos and comments, mainly because it requires user registration and it does not offer English menu. If you want to try it by yourself, Our writer Serkan Toto explained how to use Niconico-douga at Tokyotronic.
In December, Gihyo, a tech-oriented publisher (like O’Reilly in US) held a web technology meeting WEB+DB PRESS Tech Meeting, and Niconico-douga company Niwango, offered to host the meeting videos available WITHOUT Niconico MEMBERSHIP. At this point, these 6 embedded videos (with viewers’ comments, of course) are the only opened videos you can see how movied on Niconico-douga.
Although these tech talk videos are not mainstream type on Niconico-douga, you may be able to see how they are same as, and how different from other YouTube like video-sharing services. Number of comments are not so high, and font size and colors have not much variety when you compare with popular (usually Anime and/or parody) videos on Niconico-douga popular video ranking, though. I am sure that services like YouTube and Ustream.tv can take the flavour in.
You can also see what kind of tech presentations are made in Japan in Japanese. All speakers are top-notch web application/service engineers, including Hatena CTO Naoya Ito, and ex-livedoor CTO, A-list tech blogger Dan Kogai.
