Microsoft Will Try Out Blog Service In Japan

theodp writes "Signaling its growing awareness of blogging as both a potential threat and a new business opportunity, Microsoft is turning to Japan to launch its first blog service and aims to have 1 million users in the first year. Not surprisingly, Microsoft's offering targets mobile bloggers, since nearly 90 percent of Japan's cell phones have Internet capability."

Comments

Re:Japanese Characters

[spectral]

He's completely wrong. Every japanese cell phone I've used has each column of the chart on a button..

so if you have the chart like

a ka sa ta ..
i ki shi chi
u ku su tsu
e ke se te
o ko so to

then '2' would be a, press again for i, again for u.. depending on the manufacturer and model, you'd go through hiragana first, then hit katakana. Or, you'd switch modes to get to katakana/hiragana/alpha/numeric inputs.

For the kanji, there's either a special button and it'll interpret, or some phones have a little window at the bottom that has a list of commonly used words that start with what you've typed in so far. This was a really nifty feature on mine that I loved.. saved me a lot of typing for when I was emailing my japanese friends.

And yes, I said email: that's how text messaging works over there. There's in-network (c-mail, skymail, whatever..), but to get between J-Phone, DoCoMo, au, etc.. you use regullar smtp email, built in to the damned phone. Annoying when my parents didn't realize that I was reading their 10 page long emails on a cell screen, but oh well.

Not their first

[ahertz]

Microsoft does run a site called "The Spoke," at http://www.thespoke.com. I'll admit that I don't know anyone who uses it (and it's badly broken in Firefox), but it's got Blogs and "Copyright Microsoft 2004" at the bottom. So it's not quite fair to say this is their first entry into the world of blogging.