cathycracks.com

saw it via twitter from Jeremiah:

@jonathanbrowne was telling me about this Japanese Web 2.0 list: http://tinyurl.com/6dv4vl compares and contrasts US vs Japan

I wrote a comment on the post but decided to elaborate more on the topic. So here it goes.

Since I have lived in Japan for a year in Hokkaido I feel like I might have learned some stuff about Japanese web services and the way people use them from a different perspective. What does this mean? I had mainly been in touch with people NOT in the tech industry, not early adopters.

Booking travel plans online:
If a Japanese person HAVE to book travels online they’d go to:
Jalan.net. (entirely in Japanese, also no mobile version)
Jalan also has publications on traveling which ties back to the website. The magazines are popular as they publish specific area or holidays specials.

I tried out Jal tours recently and it was a pleasant experience. It is the tour department of the Japan airline.

However, most of the people I know, being not techies, they still prefer going to travel agency and read the travel booklets and let the travel agency find the best package.

(also, on the topic of traveling in Japan. Most of the hotels charge per person instead of per room.)

Social networking:
The Japanese version of facebook is painful to read. really. My Japanese is not that good but it still hurts my face reading it. They do however use mixi religiously. I have an account and people would add me as a friend and want to be friends with me. lots of random connections. It’s a bit hard to use. Also, it’s a trend in Japan to not put your own photo as your profile photo. Most of the girls have their dog, hello kitty, cute model, or scenery as their profile photo.

Gourmet:
My personal favorite is hotpepper. I am not sure how often the website is actually being used, but hotpepper releases free publication at the end of the month (Friday?) in every major cities. You can find hotpepper yellowpage-look-alike books in 7-11 mostly. (I believe that other convenient stores do not carry them) The publication introduces new restaurants in the area and special deals. In Tokyo area it’s even divided down to the area. Try finding a hotpepper in the Shinjuku area, kinda hard. It’s that popular.

Electronic and such:
The biggest empire is yamada denki. Yamada promises the lowest price possible. I saw it in the news recently that they are being sued for monopoly because such reason like their reward points can be used in many other places (hotels, flights, and more).
((by the way, Japanese culture, big on points & rewards. Every store has a point card))
I am not sure how many people actually use the yamada denki website, but it really is always that slightly cheaper than the other shops. They also match competitor’s price.

Online translation service:
Yahoo Japanese translate. it’s not a good translator, but I don’t think there’s a good one out there…

Artsy:
There’s this Tokyo Art Beat that has design/artsy events in it. Lots of new contents all the time.

Music:
Probably much like the Live Nation website, there’s wess.jp. However, most of the people I know are on their favorite band’s mailing list. (mails to their cellphone.) Did you know that the super popular band in Japan - Exile - has a show on Dec 31 in Hokkaido? More amazingly is that they did not sell tickets in the first while, they were doing a lottery for people who can even purchase tickets. (it really is that popular.)

There are just my 2 cents on what I have observed in Japan during my stay here.

If one thing I have learned about the interconnectivity of Japan, is that the convenient stores really are convenient. It’s where you see new posters for things, it’s where you buy magazines, and it’s where you purchase your bus ticket or movie tickets. You can send your printing to 7-11 photocopier and it’ll print and wait for you at the store. I also pay most of my bills (i.e. cellphone, internet, electricity) with a barcode on my bill to scan in any convenient stores. They call the convenient store combini here. It’s probably my favorite Japanized English word.

Do you know more? As a gaijin in Japan this is as good as I can go.

Back in 2004 I had a blog in wordpress that I kept for a class in university hosted on the school’s server. After graduating I decided to keep blogging and transferred that wordpress blog to my own wordpress. After being around the web industry for a while I decided to transfer my wordpress blog to drupal. The old blog was hosted on everybrandnewday.com (which is now offline). I have gone through many migrations of data and upgrades; however……

Last month I tried to upgrade to drupal 6. I did back up everything like everyone always tells you to. However, when everything failed to work and I was about to revert back to the old database….. That’s when I realized that the database zip file was actually corrupted. It failed to extract. After many struggle and painful times, I decided to ditch my drupal site and start over.

I had never left wordpress, I always had other blogs running on wordpress even when my personal site was on drupal. The new interface and functions won me over. I think it’s ok to have a wordpress site now.

I used the nifty tool in wordpress to import the latest posts from my old site using RSS. It’s quite a nice feature.

Anyways, so that’s it.

I have some old posts on my old blog that I really did enjoy writing, maybe I will copy and paste them over when I run out of new ideas to write. I hope my new ideas and thoughts can keep you entertained as much as I did before.

Google reader now comes with search, and it also has a different loading graphic.

However, gmail is still using old school red ugly loading graphic:

Google’s blog post about the new search

I hope Google extends the search bar to all their services, and hopefully update all loading graphics for all services as well.

so it seems like, craigslist is thinking a lot about money….

What’s with the Price after posting something for sale?….

it’s likely that Craigslist is thinking about paid posting?

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uploaded by cathycracks.

I went to Salt tasting room last night. It’s a wonderful amazing place. If you like wine and you like cheese, this place is for you.

I also quite enjoy reading their opening blog. It looks sincere.

As they say on the website:

A restaurant in Blood Alley? With no kitchen or hot food? Which only serves cheese and meat?

If you are walking down Carrall street in Vancouver, going into Gastown. Pay attention when you walk by blood alley. You’ll see a huge salt shaker sign. It’s their smart logo.

I had a tasting plate, which is choice of 3 meat/cheese with 3 condiments. I said I want the oka, and no corned beef and no olives, they just did the rest of the pairing. It was quite tasty. Their menu constantly changes, I can’t wait to go back next time and try different meat and cheese.

You must be kidding me.

Flickr is implementing new rules. You can only have 3000 contacts and maximum 75 tags for a photo? That is hilarious. Even though it might seem like a good way of filtering out spams and people using flickr as a social networking tool, but who says that it shouldn’t be how flickr is used. It started out as a photo sharing service but the social networking factor in it is definitely significant to its success. There might be a better way of eliminating the spams, how about allowing users to set who can post images in the comment? Have you seen some groups with huge graphics that it asks members to post in comments? It’s annoying. Have you seem people posting really ugly huge geocities style gif in comments before? I have… Once again, it’s annoying. (Hey if you need more proof, I’ll go dig up a screenshot!)

In terms of the account merging issue? it’s totally old news. Flickr got bought out by yahoo, it would only makes sense if yahoo gets all the users with yahoo accounts. It’s pure business, nothing personal. I guess a lot of people are pissed off. But really, it’s just going to end up like another email account that you never use. I have at least 5 hotmail accounts and 2 yahoo accounts. Purely for the sake of having the accounts.

I just hope I will not have more than 3000 friends. Sorry if I am popular. gee.

more discussion.

Tags: flickr, news, web, yahoo

I am in the process of moving all my files and all the things I’ve ever put online to media temple. It’s a lot of work, since I am hosting 2 other domains and have 3 blogs to move. I have decided to move all my domains and all my hosting to media temple. If I really have to tell my old hosting why I am moving, I would probably say that media temple has a kick ass beautiful usable user interface for the admin control panel I’ll skip talking about all the techie goodness it offers because those are just a given.

Therefore, don’t be alert when things seem to be offline. I promise I will get everything back online asap.

Technorati Tags: media temple, hosting, web

I am very excited today. Google just approved me for the beta of Website Optimizer, it will allow me to create different variation of landing page for my PPC campaign and hopefully allow me to find the best body copy for my landing page. (watch the demo here) Adwords is all surrounded by the ability to give different variation to test out best result.

Google has a whole series of nice tools that they have created to help people like me to do their job in terms of making online marketing work in all sort of ways.

• Google Webmaster tools
  I think this is a good tool. It’s especially helpful when you are trying to do some very precise SEO for your site.
  (If you go to Google Webmaster Central, there are more similar tools google provides.)
• Google checkout
  This is especially helpful when you are signed up with Google Analytics and Adwords because it can be easily integrated and they sometimes offer speical deals when you are an existing Adwords customer.
• Want to integrate Google search on your site and want to customize it? Google Free is Google’s solution. (As far as I am concerned… it is not working anymore.) There’s actually another alternative. Google Co-op Custom Search Engine. If you don’t want ads you’ll probably have to be a non-profilt organization. As Google puts it: Google Co-op is a platform that enables you to customize the web search experience for users of both Google and your own website.
  I love the Google co-op search engine. It’s so easy to use for people who don’t even know how things work.

I will soon implement the Google Website optimizer. If it works well, I will let you know.

Technorati Tags: google, google checkout, google tools, google website optimizer, online marketing, optimize, optmizer, search engine, tools

I am not even kidding.

iphone countdown.com

Can you believe it? People are really going crazy over the iphone.

I have recently started doing intense corporate Search Engine Marketing at Laplink. I manage the PPC accounts and make sure they are making lots of money. After dealing with all the different platforms, I have observed more than just interface/usability problems throughout the process.

I have always believe in direct marketing. A face, a person, represent a brand. The customer service department is where the brand/company reaches out and presents itself. It’s extremely important in terms of achieving customer satisfaction. I dealt with Google Adwords through email support and live chat support, Yahoo Panama through email and phone support, and MSN AdCenter through email support. I am going to share my experience.

Google Adwords

After couple clicks into “Contact us”, a live help chat option shows up. It’s not always there but if it’s available it’s a much faster way to get response instead of waiting for emails. The live help is very timely and it usually helps. (One interesting about live chat, I think all the live chat reps are female, or at least they all give out female names. I have used the live chat many times and I’ve never seen a male rep. I wonder if it’s intentional.) The good thing about live chat is that they allow you to send transcript to yourself after the chat. All the chats are saved by Google for future reference. The feedback form appears after the chat ends, with couple very brief simple questions.

Google’s email support is pretty fast and timely. When the Live Chat rep says that she will contact you via email for update on your status, you can usually expect the email in the same working day.

I am very happy with Google so far. They are fast and very helpful. They listen to what the customers have to say and find the best solution. Sometimes I even get solutions to problems I didn’t even know of.

Yahoo Panama Sponsored Search

As an American company, we recently got to be upgraded to the new Panama platform. (It is not available to Canadian customer yet. The other international market places are still in the process of upgrading to this platform.) There were some frustration during the transition because of some technical issues. I figured out that it is always faster to just pick up the phone and ask for help. Yahoo actually gives different levels of user account a different kind of phone support. I was upgraded to a premium account; however, I did not experience enough to tell the difference. I personally find that the email replies are always very “canned” and not really answering the question.The Yahoo email support is decent. However, there is no place where a customer can rate the service. (Both Google and MSN do it) If you are not entirely satisfied with the customer service you got, there’s no where for you to tell Yahoo. In the end, you will probably have to call customer service and be directed to the executive team.

I think the new platform release is probably the main reason why a lot of things are still not in place. After all, it is beta. It’s getting better day by day.

MSN

The first confusing thing about MSN AdCenter is that I couldn’t find a number to call. I found out about the number of customer service after asking it in an email. MSN AdCenter’s respond time is very fast. I can usually expect a reply in 24 hours. The replies are always very detailed and very helpful. A rep is assigned to the account for the case. I was so satisfied with the email support I never needed to call them. During business hour, I can expect an email reply in 2 - 3 hours, which is definitely fast enough even for emergency issues. The only thing that was confusing was after the support. For every case number you get, you will receive an evaluation email asking you to fill out a survey. Here’s the trick, the survey email is really not sent out on the day of the case, it is usually after. However, sometimes a case can expand into different stages of problems, which then have different case numbers. I received around 10 survey emails in 2 days from Microsoft AdCenter, all regarding a different case. I am not sure how you are, but to me, the case number looks something like SRX1024420000ID. I really wanted to give feedback to AdCenter because I had a wonderful experience dealing with one of my reps; however, it was almost too complicated to do so.

The phone support is very good as well. I only had to call AdCenter once because the MSN Sympatico toll free number really doesn’t work on this page. I called AdCenter wondering if they can find out a right number for me to call. It is almost abusing the customer service, but hey, they found me a number and a sales rep.

After all, I am just sharing my experience with customer service and how the business treats its customer service. As a sponsored search platform, I am very satisfied with all 3 of them. (If I like Google better, it’s only because it’s my preferred search engine.)

technorati tags: google+adwords, marketing, msn+adcenter, online+marketing, pay+per+click, ppc, search+engine+marketing, search+engine, sem, sponsored+search, yahoo+panama