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

Yeah, yeah.

[scowling]

Microsoft just wants to get its fingers into every pie that it can. Today it's blogging. Tomorrow it'll be a search engine. Next week it'll be jacket-powered palmtops or some such crap.

(I get the feeling that the most popular screen colour for these Japanese blogs will be blue, for some reason.)

Blog Service?

[AnonymousKev]

Okay, I'll confess ignorance. I have two questions about this new Microsoft service.
1) How is a Blog Service any different from Slashdot journals?
2) Why would people pay money to Microsoft to post comments and short, misspelled paragraphs about their lives?

Re:Blog Service?

[BadMrMojo]

Why would people pay money to Microsoft to post comments and short, misspelled paragraphs about their lives?

The basic service is free (according to TFA). It's not about getting ¥ from the users, it's about controlling another standard and another portal in order to use it to try to corner another market.

Then they can use the information they've farmed for whatever nefarious ends they wish. Of course it's nefarious. It's always nefarious. Not just because it's M$ but because it's business.

Re:Blog Service?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sigh...so tired about hearing techies rant about how [boring|biased|political|stoopid] blogging is. And yes, blogging is similar to Slashdot journals, but people use blogs for different reasons. If perhaps you just wanted to rant or highlight news, then perhaps Slashdot journals is for you. However, some use it for political purposes, some use it to deliver news, and some people like to talk about what happened to their cat this morning. And for those people that talk about thier cat, they also like to post pictures and transform their blog into a personal webpage. I feel most of the comments/attention of blogging are directed towards political and news sites, but very little media attention is brought towards personal blogging.

And as boring as that is to some, the psychological profile that a personal blog can build can be invaluable for lots of different reasons. First of all, for anyone who asks you, "So what have you been up to?", it's nice to throw them a link rather than repeat the last week or two of my life over and over. But the most prominent reason for personal blogging, I feel, is for social networks/dating services. I mean, any two people can have similar interests, but if I can skim through a two year history about someone's daily musings, I'd say I stand a much better chance of knowing how they tick.

Has anybody here ever heard of Xanga? No one here ever mentions Xanga. Not as feature rich, technical or flexible as [blogger|livejournal|MT], but with an Alexa ranking of 73, you've got to wonder how it gets so much traffic. I'd like to believe its appeal lies in its simplicity and ease of use for non-techies (who I believe are the majority of the population), which is why it has so many people. And while there are no hard statistics on this, but if I had to estimate, I say a good percentage of those xangans are Asian (I'm Asian too, so not trying to be racist). So given the above, I'd think that Japan might be a pretty good place to test out some launch and establish some new blogging software. But these are just the $.02 of an avid fan of personal blogging.

Re:New trend

[tool462]

I would argue that it's not necessarily because they are more receptive to technology, but more likely because the barrier to entry is lower. It's less expensive and more practical to deploy cutting-edge and sometimes risky technologies in population-dense areas like Japan and Europe than in the sprawling suburbia that is the United States. Once that infrastructure is in place, it then becomes that much easier to provide new services over that infrastructure. Any mobile blogging service would be doomed to fail in the US right now because of the relatively low number of users with mobile internet access and the still fewer who actually use it for something more than the occasional instant message.

Re:New trend

[_anomaly_]

I'm assuming you meant "countries like Japan first" instead of "companies like Japan first"...

At any rate, this is hardly a "new trend", as you put it. Launching products in test markets in order to determine their profitability has been around as long as capitalism has.

Re:Using others blogging sites

[geek]

"I don't know why people would do blogging on other poeple's sites"

Oh yeah, I'll just tell my grandma and my 14 year old niece to code their own and host it on a linux box running slackware. That'll be a sure fire way of getting the idea adopted by the main stream. Jesus, do people like you ever stop to consider that 99.9% of the people on the net don't give a rats ass about the fucking source code and whether they have access to it?

I wasn't replying to your post

[foreverdisillusioned]

Didn't see it at all, in fact, as I was too busy screaming at Firefox for crashing every other second. Was replying to the parent, who said simply "Brog." In actuality, the L is probably the least severe problem with translating "Blog" into Japanese, and yours fits nicely.

Free speech

[kabz]

One thing occurs to me about Microsoft blogging: Will people be able to criticise Microsoft, and/or endorse open source etc ?

I'm not sure if it apochraphal (?spelling) but didn't Microsoft write a clause into the Frontpage license that forbade licensees from using it to publish any material that was anti-Microsoft ?

I suppose the flipside of this is that if Microsoft implement filtering and censorship, then they may be able to create a 'clean' blogging area and appeal to a more family audience, much as AOL does.