Looks like the new Japanese Government formed under Hatoyama-san have started a blog on Ameba. There is an official editor for the blog talking about major issues of the day.
Ameba operate a blogging platform hosting all the sites in a similar fashion to wordpress.com and don’t offer any self-hosted options like the wordpress.org software.
It is interesting that the Government has decided to entrust its information to a third party operator, that they have no control over whether the business continues or not. Their choice of Ameba may have been due to the number of celebrities and artists who host a blog on Ameba. It is certainly a big plus for Cyber Agent who run Ameba.
I set up a blog on Ameba for shibuya246 a while ago but never actually put any content on it. I also have a space on Mixi as well. Maybe now that Hatoyama-san is blogging on Ameba it might be time to start myself.
Do you blog or read any Japanese language networks? How do you find them compared to English language blog networks?
9 comments
I have an account on Mixi, but is more to follow friends rather than put anything on it.
But I’m thinking to start posting soon. It’s funny after all…
Thinking of it, maybe they don’t have Blogs on Venus to share with us 🙂
LOL
Can’t read Japanese yet, so I do not follow any Japanese language blogs. My wife is Japanese, and we are raising our child(ren) bilingual so I have been working on it. I need to keep ahead of my kids or they can talk about me behind my back 🙂
Being raised in a bilingual family, you definitly need to know both languages.
And beware, if they learn other languages you are done 🙂 Just be sure to understand the language they argue in.
RT @Shibuya246: Japanese Government Blog, Japan Living | Shibuya246 http://bt.io/AJHz
You’d think that the govt. of japan wouldn’t want to trust a third party for information. Almost sorta like over here. When pres Obama was elected, and before that he always carried his Blackberry with him. And the secret service wanted to put a kibosh on that type of information. I don’t really blog because I bon’t have a site of my own. Also don’t understand html language for posting. And of all the blogs that i follow it’s mainly yours, and a few others. If it’s in Japanese, I use Bablefish to translate but it doesn’t always give an accurate translation of the site.
It is hard to find good translation software, even to give you just a snapshot of what the text means. It was good to see that Obama-san was able to win the argument about his Blackberry. Good for him 🙂
… and of course, thanks for always contributing on the blog.
Nice find and good article. I really like this blog.
I agree that they have chosen Ameba because of the many celebs and artists that host blogs there, another reason is that Ameba loads on mobile phones a lot faster than PCs and this is where the majority of Japanese people read their online news.