Channel 2
I’ve just stumbled across Hideki Furukawa’s Q&A With the Founder of Channel 2 on the Japan Media Review. So Channel 2 is a big talk shop; according to Furukawa they get 600 million page views a month. That makes Slashdot, which gets 110 million page views per month (source) small by comparison and Metafilter, which gets 6 million page views per month (source), tiny; never mind how inaccurate these figures probably are.
Are there any Channel 2 users in the house? I’m particularly interested in the oft-repeated claim that the web is going to change the face of public discourse in Japan, which has a press that is often accused of succumbing to self-censorship and doing nothing beyond rehashing the media releases issued by corporations and government bodies. Does Channel 2 give the people the voice that the press denies them?
Also, does the completely anonymous format really help? According to Ishimura it prevents flames and keeps long-time users from wielding authority over others. The former point goes against my experience with English-speaking online communities, none of which, as far as I’m aware, insist on absolute anonymity: I find that people get more comfortable with each other the better they know who they are interacting with. The second point I find particularly astounding: if you want a successful online community, you have to introduce anonymity as a safeguard against the seniority principle, one of the most deeply entrenched traditions in Japanese society?
Any thoughts?
Comments
I know that Channel 2 has had a fairly bad press and that they’re supposed to be responsible for every social blight from underage prostitution to group suicides. I can’t judge to what extent this criticism is overstated.
Maybe I’ve got my priorities upside down, but what I find truly offensive about Channel 2 is its interface design: here’s Japan’s biggest site and it looks as if it were a Geocities site created by a twelve-year-old back in 1997.
The saddest and probably most telling design blunder: frames. Channel 2 pages are buried in a frameset, which means that all of them have the same URL, which means in turn that you can’t link to an individual page unless you go to the extra trouble of pulling it out of the frameset. I say this is telling because it tells me something about the rest of the web in this country: other web sites apparently see no point (yet) in linking to Channel 2 stories and discussing them. This is unthinkable anywhere else in the world; if big talk shops such as Kuro5hin.org or Plastic.com suddenly decided to frame their content, their users would be sure to stage a mutiny.
There would be very few people who deny the framesets in japan. I haven’t met such deniers.
In Channel 2, crackers sometimes burry browser crashers or virus homepages into links. So Java/Java Script/Active X are much more disliked than frame sets for their security problems.
Channel 2 basically uses framesets and new-window function. The browser is split into 2 frames. The left frame displays many themes. If you click one of them, each board appears in the right window.
In any board, hot topics are located in upper positions. If they are clicked, you can jump to the topic appearing in right window. But if you click older topics or linked pages, then they are displayed in a new window.
Those specifications are gradually constructed for better usability and user requests.
The basis of Channel 2 is far from that of normal html. They are designed for little transfer size, simpleness and fast viewing.
Only the context is important (This can be said in blogs), and no need for beautiful pictures and designs.
I haven’t feel ploblems in use at all.
At last, there are many Channel 2 browsers for viewing Channel 2 more convenient.
If you use them, you are free from evil frames.
Hi BBT,
Frames are primarily a usability issue; they make web pages harder to use. Sure, there are security concerns that are weightier than these usability issues, but since frames do nothing towards solving any security issues, it doesn’t make much sense to play off one against the other.
The usability issues are still there: framed pages are hard to index by search engines, which makes them hard to find. Framed pages are also hard to link to; in most cases I can pull a page out of its frameset and link to it, but then I’m sending readers to a page that has its navigation missing. These problems can be avoided by avoiding frames.
Thanks for the Monazilla link: looks interesting. I’ve been using Mozilla since about version 0.9.
Thanks Rudolf.
I’ve read those frame problems before, so I can understand what you say. But what I want to say here is not such problems, but the difference between two internet cultures. Many Japanese don’t care frames, but others may not. So japanese sites often uses frames. (below links) Especially personal news sites seem to prefer two split frame design. I haven’t heard anyone complaining about it. For me, this site is the first site that cites the Channel 2 frameset.
http://zakzak.co.jp
http://www.renpou.com
http://techside.net
http://tbn.to
I am also a mozilla-firebird user. ;-)
Whee, geek fight! (What follows is probably uninteresting or dead boring to most readers of this site: if so, please go back to the main page and read something else.)
OK, I’m not very familiar with the Japanese Web, so it looks pretty bad if I keep complaining about it. But then I’m an unreasonable person, so here goes anyway.
Your “difference between two internet cultures” doesn’t work all that well for me. The way I see it, Japan is about five years ahead of everyone else when it comes to mobile, Internet-enabled services, but I humbly submit it’s about five years behind everyone else when it comes to best coding practices on the Web at large.
See, a couple of years ago, the rest of the Web outside Japan was cluttered with framesets, too. Meanwhile, it seems, people have come to their senses and don’t use them any more. =)
Moreover, and this is the important point, in the last few years web developers/designers have come to care about Web standards: now that the standards are finally supported in the major browsers, coders are throwing away the old hacks such as table-based layouts and font tags and build their stuff in xhtml and css. This hasn’t really reached the big commercial sites yet (Wired is a notable exception), but it’s a very broad movement.
And it isn’t happening in Japan. Tommy Aoyama translated the Web Standards FAQ into Japanese a few years ago, but that translation is gone now without a trace: nobody seemed to take much notice. This is strange since part of the World Wide Web Consortium is based at Keio University, so one would expect they’d have some traction in this country. There are, as far as I know, only a few Web developers such as Business Architects who write valid code (and there are sites such as Pallanoia.org that almost validate).
None of the sites you link even declare a document type, and many are riddled with font tags. Why hasn’t Japan caught up with the rest of the world?
Then again, I’d love to be proven wrong. A few links will do. =)
Commenting on this entry is closed.
Well, Ruedi.
I don’t know much about internet communities. But I do know about Channel 2. There, people voice their ideas anonymously, so there are many disgusting comments. You know, they are infringing upon human rights. And some people worsen discrimination.
Last year, we taught our students not to be affected by wrong information. It is really important for us to discerning about the things that surround us.