Is Japan Today the Future of the West?

Tokyo Night 8 – Frank Peter Lohoff (2007)

While the West struggles with its absence of meaningful culture and asks whether hipsters represent the end of western civilization, Japan may already be ahead of the curve in the realm of stagnation and decay.

Feelings of alienation and pessimism abound in Japan in spite of the “cool” cachet the Japanese have in the West thanks to the Harajuku Girls and films like Lost in Translation. The new youth see little hope for a better future and little meaning in the present. As hipsters of the west find irony to be an almost bankrupt currency after two decades of use, the Japanese have already graduated to retreating to virtual reality and suicide pacts.

Roland Kelts takes a deeper look at Japan and its cultural crisis in We Grew Up Too Comfortable to Take Risks:

The combined effect of this assault on the global consciousness is a vision of a contemporary Japan exploding with energy, inventiveness, color and light – qualities we generally ascribe to youthfulness: actually being young, or perpetually feeling that way. Many foreigners see in today’s Japan the face of the future.

But inside the country, specters of darker hues shadow the horizon: an aging population and a declining or stagnant birthrate; an expanding class of young, part-time workers (freeters) with checkered resumes and scant skills; and so-called NEETs (“Not in Employment, Education or Training”), with their CVs and skill sets suspended in mid-youth. Stories of pathological young shut-ins (hikikomori), who withdraw into their bedrooms and virtual worlds to avoid the real one, and internet suicide pacts, through which young loners meet one another online in order to kill themselves in the bricks-and-mortar world, have begun haunting headlines at home and abroad.

“There doesn’t seem to be much optimism,” says literary translator, author and University of Tokyo professor Motoyuki Shibata. Shibata’s current classes are made up of what he calls “the first generation in modern Japan to grow up without the sense that things would get better.”

“We’re the risk-averse generation,” a 20-year-old female student at the University of Tokyo explained to me. “We grew up too comfortable to take risks.”

Read the rest of the article at this link.

Radiohead’s “pay what you want” gamble pays off

People downloaded “In Rainbows” for free, but many also chose to pay

Radiohead’s risky gamble of asking people to pay what they felt was a fair price for their latest album, In Rainbows, seems to have paid off and has now put the music industry on notice.

4 Search Engines for a Better Wikipedia Experience

Wikipedia – the world’s most popular collaborative website

Are you a Wikipedia junkie like I am? I’ll spend hours bouncing from page to page never once completing a destination that I first intended but still having a great time throughout the entire journey. This site also uses wikipedia as a source for many of the hyperlinks that you find embedded throughout the posts.

I just came across a great article that lists four search engines for wikipedia. One of the links offered is Similpedia:

Similipedia is one of the best Wikipedia search engines available. Not only is it extremely accurate and effective, it has a completely different approach to search. Instead of typing in a query, e.g. computers, you are asked to copy and paste a URL or a paragraph containing at least 100 words. Just press “enter” and let it go to work.

I decided to try copying and pasting the first two paragraphs of Tina’s article on Adobe Reader. The result were articles on Wikipedia ranging from Adobe Acrobat, PDF, to a comparison of e-book formats – all of which were relevant. Similpedia just added a new widget to their website that allows you to add code to your website and Similpedia will automatically add relevant Wikipedia articles. They have other widgets that include: a Firefox add-on, bookmarklet, contextual RSS as well as a WordPress widget for similar content. I highly recommend trying them all out.

Read about the other three search engines at this link.

25 Internet Startups that didn’t make it

Big ideas with big money backing them couldn’t turn these sites into winners

It was only a little over a decade ago that we were told the internet would completely revolutionize how we would shop, read, interact, learn, invest, and smell. Maybe the order was a tall one and maybe the internet didn’t replace our traditional methods of doing all of these things, but it certainly has given us more options. The 1990s saw the proliferation of websites devoted to e-commerce of one sort or another as well as e-applications. These resulted in the dot.com boom that became a dot.com fizzle as everyone tried to tap into this new online market for their products and services. From Homer Simpson and his Compuglobalhypermeganet Systems to The Onion’s e-graters.com, everyone was taking a swipe at the hysteria.

Some sites have managed to survive and thrive, ebay.com and amazon.com being the two most notable.

The Business Pundit lists for us the top 25 Internet Startups that didn’t make it. All your favourites are there, including pets.com, etoys.com, and the spam-friendly lycos.com.

Speaking of which, whatever happened to these guys?

The Birth of Cuil

Cuil is ready to take google on head-to-head

Google.

A name which meant nothing several years ago is now not only a noun, but a verb as well. And it’s one that has transformed our daily lives. Books have been written about google and whether or not it’s making us smarter or turning us into attention-deficit dummies. Google has anchored itself atop the food chain of search engines on the internet and has been challenging Microsoft for some time now as the largest and most important IT company in the world.

However, google now has a challenger in the search engine sweepstakes: ladies and gentlemen, meet Cuil (pronounced “cool”). It was launched earlier today and boasts an incredible 120 billion plus websites in its index, thus outnumbering google who some time ago stopped publishing their index figures.

On Cuil:

Patterson instead intends to upstage Google, which she quit in 2006 to develop a more comprehensive and efficient way to scour the Internet.

The end result is Cuil, pronounced “cool.” Backed by $33 million in venture capital, the search engine plans to begin processing requests for the first time Monday.

Cuil had kept a low profile while Patterson, her husband, Tom Costello, and two other former Google engineers – Russell Power and Louis Monier – searched for better ways to search.

Now, it’s boasting time.

For starters, Cuil’s search index spans 120 billion Web pages.

Patterson believes that’s at least three times the size of Google’s index, although there is no way to know for certain. Google stopped publicly quantifying its index’s breadth nearly three years ago when the catalog spanned 8.2 billion Web pages.

Cuil won’t divulge the formula it has developed to cover a wider swath of the Web with far fewer computers than Google. And Google isn’t ceding the point: Spokeswoman Katie Watson said her company still believes its index is the largest.

It’s been a very bumpy day one for Cuil with problems like their servers not being able to handle the loads and with a lot of search results showing spam that any decent site would filter out. However, Rome wasn’t built in a day and google could use the competition.

Cyber-Nationalism: Fighting Wars Online

“No way man, the EU is waaaayyyy better than the USA!!!!”

Conflict amongst humans first arose on land. It quickly spread its way to sea. Several millenia later, it made it into the air above us thanks to the invention of the Wright Brothers. Less than a century after the successful takeoff at Kitty Hawk, conflict is being fought on the fourth frontier, the internet.

For those of us familiar with usenet back in the 1990s, warfare was being waged on all sorts of newsgroups as such soc.culture.israel and soc.culture.yugoslavia. Fast forward a few years and internet forums played host to conflicts not only current, but centuries old. The rise of web 2.0 has seen these battles move onto new battlefields, from YouTube to Facebook.

The Economist takes a look at this new battleground in: Cyber-nationalism – the brave new world of e-hatred.

A quick excerpt:

But e-arguments also led to hacking wars. Nobody is surprised to hear of Chinese assaults on American sites that promote the Tibetan cause; or of hacking contests between Serbs and Albanians, or Turks and Armenians. A darker development is the abuse of blogs, social networks, maps and video-sharing sites that make it easy to publish incendiary material and form hate groups. A study published in May by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a Jewish human-rights group, found a 30% increase last year in the number of sites that foment hatred and violence; the total was around 8,000.

Social networks are particularly useful for self-organised nationalist communities that are decentralised and lack a clear structure. On Facebook alone one can join groups like “Belgium Doesn’t Exist”, “Abkhazia is not Georgia”, “Kosovo is Serbia” or “I Hate Pakistan”. Not all the news is bad; there are also groups for friendship between Greeks and Turks, or Israelis and Palestinians. But at the other extreme are niche networks, less well-known than Facebook, that unite the sort of extremists whose activities are restricted by many governments but hard to regulate when they go global. Podblanc, a sort of alternative YouTube for “white interests, white culture and white politics” offers plenty of material to keep a racist amused.

LivePlasma – a great free web application to find music and movies that you like

LivePlasma is incredibly user friendly search engine for music and movies

I’m pretty sure that you’re like me in the sense that all your media these days is in digital form, whether on CDs/DVDs or on external hard drives. It’s quite convenient from user space point of view especially when you live in a downtown condo, but the lack of tactility makes it difficult to keep a running list of what you have in your head, whether it be movies or music. And if you’re like me, you like to explore and find new music or new movies based on tastes that you already have. For instance, being a fan of Broken Social Scene led me to bands like Manitoba and TV on the Radio. However this process was a purely accidental one, resulting from luck.

I’ve recently come across a free web application called LivePlasma which takes the luck out of the equation and gives you results fast and free. All you need to do is go to the site (it doesn’t require registration) and type in the name of an artist or actor or movie and LivePlasma will automatically give you dozens of options of bands or films that fit within that genre. Let me show you:

Google: making our generation a dumb generation

Some claim that Google is killing our ability to concentrate by chronically distracting us

The internet was supposed to bring us libraries of knowledge at the first click of a mouse. It has, but many aren’t using it. Instead, we’re wasting our time on distractions such as social networks or throwaway video clips on YouTube. We might be bad, but teens are even worse:

But this isn’t the informational paradise dreamt of by Bill Gates and Google: 90% of sites visited by teenagers are social networks. They are immersed not in knowledge but in “gossip and social banter”.

“They don’t,” says Bauerlein, “grow up.” They are “living off the thrill of peer attention. Meanwhile, their intellects refuse the cultural and civic inheritance that has made us what we are now”.

As for us on the wrong side of 30, this new technology is affecting our ability to focus on simple tasks as we attempt to take on too much at the same time. Multitasking may be a myth. We are finding ourselves scanning and skimming, not taking time to absorb the information given to us.

Nicholas Carr asks the important question Is Google making us stupid? He has a very good point. Now, I’m off to read some texts on my blackberry :)

Facebook is childish and dangerous…but we still love it

Is Facebook’s popularity dipping?

Toronto is the Facebook capital of the world. We love it. From those of us who’ll post pictures of anything that comes to mind to those of us who update our status several times a day. We know it’s silly and for most of us it’s a complete waste of time. Simon Dumenco tells us that even Bill Gates has quit using Facebook after having a daily half-hour habit. He was being bombarded with roughy 8,000 friend requests each day. And yes, it is quite silly, as Dumenco explains:

But Facebook’s ick factor in the executive suite might have as much to do with its shiny, happy world of “friendship” as with security. “There’s almost an inverse relationship between seriousness and how much you participate in social networking,” says ReputationDefender’s Fertik, laughing. That basically nails it: Facebook is simply unserious—particularly given how it prompts hard-driving business executives to regress into adolescent vernacular. “Poking” people, requesting “friends,” writing on someone’s “wall”: It’s cute when you’re in high school or college. But in a corporate environment, it sounds disingenuous and downright silly.

I personally detest the proliferation of ridiculous applications (and especially hate being tested on my movie knowledge!) but now and then a good *poke is a bit of fun :)

Can’t act, can’t sing, isn’t rich….Julia Allison: Internet Celebrity

She can’t act, she can’t sing, she isn’t wealthy like the Hiltons or Kim Kardashian, but she’s an internet celebrity nonetheless

A British tabloid journalist once quipped that Liz Hurley was “famous for being famous”. A clever comment at the time, no doubt. However with Andy Warhol’s “15 minutes of fame” becoming a reality thanks to the internet age, celebrity is a currency all the more easier to obtain. One need not a talent of the traditional type nor does one need to create something new. Julia Allison has managed to reach the lofty heights of celebrity through dogged self-promotion. It’s a neo-celebrity as explained by Jason Tanz in Wired Magazine:

Allison may not be famous by the traditional definition; certainly nobody here seems to recognize her. But to a devoted niche of online fans — and an even more devoted niche of detractors — she is a bona fide celebrity. She says that more than 10,000 people read her blog daily, and gossip sites like Gawker, Radar Online, and Valleywag detail her every exploit. An anonymous blogger has set up a site, Reblogging Julia, dedicated to parsing Allison’s posts. The New York Times has profiled her, and New York magazine has called Allison — a dating columnist for Time Out New York and former editor-at-large for Star — “the most famous young journalist in the city.”

Read more about her in Tanz’s Wired article: Julia Allison and the Secrets of Self-Promotion.

Hey, wanna direct your own Radiohead video?

Image from “House of Cards” by Radiohead

After the success of their “pay what you want” download coup for “In Rainbows”, Radiohead are now taking fan interactivity a step further by allowing you to play with their new video. It’s Open Source and once you create your take on the song, you can upload to a YouTube Group specific to the song. Sean Dodson of the UK Guardian explains it a bit further in Is Radiohead the latest band to go open source?