We’ve been paying particularly close attention to Japanese blog widgets since we started working on Joblet. After all, every widget is vying with ours for unlimited but limited sidebar real estate. Here’s five of the coolest widgets we’ve found so far.
1. Naka no Hito
Naka no Hito (“Insider”) is an ingeniously simple widget which tracks your blog readers who are reading on company time. Beyond being cheap corporate espionage for gauging which company’s employees are wasting the most time reading blogs, it can be an incredible way for corporate or business-focused bloggers to see if they are reaching their target customers, clients, and competitors.
It even provides a map which enables you to zoom in to the building level, which is almost creepy until you remember how massive Dentsu’s main office (attribution) is.
Despite, or because of, being released only a few months ago, Naka No Hito is been quickly adopted by many of Japan’s most popular IT bloggers.
It’s interesting to us that bloggers would openly disclose their Naka No Hito usage. It is essentially an site metrics tool along the lines of Google Analytics, which tend to hang out quietly in the header. Plus it doesn’t give any perceived credibility and readership statistics along the lines of Feedburner’s chicklet counter.
Of all the blog widgets I scanned through, I feel Naka No Hito has the most potential to be huge among the English blogging community as well once an English equivalent is released.
2. Awasete Yomitai
Awasete Yomitai (“I want to read these too”) and is another popular blog widget without an equivalent in the English blog-o-sphere.
The widget’s homepage describes the service as “The blogs your readers are reading.” But unlike Naka No Hito, it’s not just useful for the blogger himself. Readers can use it to easily find truly related blogs.
Pictured above is Awasete Yomitai on 100shiki.com. Four of the other blogs listed are also maintained by by the same author, so it makes sense that they would be among his readers’ most popular blogs.
You can drill down even beyond the widget’s top 5 as well. Awasete Yomitai’s other main feature is it’s longer, post-modern Technorati Top 100-like rankings relative to any single blog, with Digg-like voting thrown in for good measure. To try it, Start at 100shiki.com’s rankings and click the [もっと] links beside any of the popular blogs as to take a Awasete-guided tour through Japan’s popular blogs, and see where you end up.
3. Rakugaki Board
Rakugaki Board (“Graffiti Board”) is made by Blog Deco, a Blog Parts company which is a joint venture of Cuppy and Kayac.
If you’ve seen the Graffiti application on Facebook, or at least MS Paint, then you should be familiar with the basics of Rakugaki Board. It’s a small frame with a limited amount of pens and colors where anyone can draw pictures or doodles.
However, it doesn’t end there. Every saved picture can be played back in real time. It is quite addictive to hunt around for artistic blogs and scan through tens or hundreds or these:
To find a few of these:
Rakugaki also predates the Facebook Graffiti application’s release by about a year.
4. Otto
Blog Deco actually made an English site for their oTTo (“Sound”) widget. Here’s the description in their words:
- oTTo is “music scribble”.
- you can make music just like scribble on the note book.
- It is a tool for people who can’t stop making music!
Basically, oTTo is a super-simple sequencer. You can adjust the tempo and volume, and save your compositions if you register. That’s it. Really fun and will have you sounding like Nobukazu Takemura in no time (note: not really).
5. Maru Ten Ten
Maru Ten Ten (“Circle Dot Dot”), described on it’s homepage as a “romantic blog tool”, is certainly the most peaceful widget I’ve come across. It’s a bit hard to describe, but it essentially turns all of the periods on your page into stars and turns your blog into a night sky. It also puts up “star links” to other blogs using the widget. Just amazingly creative and cute.
Bonus Resources
If you’re interested in hunting around for Japanese widgets, I’d recommend you first download Firefox and install the awesome Rikaichan extension, and then explore the following blog parts (“widget”) aggregation sites:
Yoroshiku!
Joseph
Comments
this is a cool news. Thank you.
