Joi Ito's Web

Radio Taiso »

Aug 27, 2004 - 21:47 UTC »

Categories:

10,000,000 people doing radio taiso
picture via Kampo

One of the participants of Fat Club uploaded an mp3 of radio taiso (morning radio exercise show) and I just set it to my alarm clock sound. radio taiso was banned by the US Occupation after WWII along with shogi (Japanese chess), all martial arts and a bunch of other things that were considered militaristic. I remember hearing a story on the radio that the original radio taiso came from the US. When life insurance just started as a business in the US, there was an uproar about "betting on people's lives." As part of a PR campaign, the life insurance companies started broadcasting exercise programs on the radio to make people more healthy. This culture migrated to Japan where now every morning millions of people exercise to radio taiso...

Here is the mp3 of chorus 1 of radio taiso.

Does anyone know if this story about the US insurance companies is true or not?

UPDATE:

The Kampo home page has little animations like the one above and a full explanation (in Japanese) on how to do these exercises properly.

Sell side advertising »

Joichi Ito

Aug 27, 2004 - 17:30 UTC »

Categories:

As someone who was heavily involved in introducing the theory of CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions) to Japanese ad agencies, I've been spending a lot of time recently thinking about what comes next after Google AdSense. Ross tried CPI (Cost Per Influence), trying to come up with an index that included the influence of the blogger or site where the ad was placed. This reminded me of the "branding value" or cluster value argument. Also, the idea would be that an influential blog would trigger a word of mouth diffusion. Anyway, inspired by Ross, John Batelle came up with a really cool idea. He writes about sell side ads where bloggers could copy ads that they saw into their blogs if they liked them. The ads would have information about what sorts of sites they could be posted on and other instructions. They would "phone home" to the advertiser who would pay the blogger for the impressions or clickthrus or whatever. The idea is that it would be viral and publisher driven, rather than advertiser driven. It would be set up so that the advertiser could track which site a blogger copied the ad from so that that they could track the diffusion pattern as well.

Anyway, awesome idea. Lets build it!

Patenting punctuation »

Joichi Ito

Aug 27, 2004 - 12:58 UTC »

Categories:

Ernest Miller @ Copyfight
Patenting Punctuation (Ernest Miller)
Well, it seems that someone has patented some new forms of punctuation: WIPO Patent Publication No. WO9219458:
Using two new punctuation marks, the question comma and the exclamation comma: and respectively, inquisitiveness and exclamation may be expressed within a written sentence structure, so that thoughts may be more easily and clearly conveyed to readers. The new punctuation marks are for use within a written sentence between words as a comma, but with more feeling or inquisitiveness.Seems that this is sort of an addition to the faddish punctuation known as the Interrobang.
via I/P Updates

This reminds me a bit of when Despair, Inc. trademarked the frowny emoticon ":-("

ecto goes wysiawyg »

Joichi Ito

Aug 27, 2004 - 12:31 UTC »

Categories:

ecto, the blogging client developed by Adriaan at my company Kula has just released the beta of the next version which has "What You See Is Almost What You Get" (wysiawyg). This means that you can now do things like drag, drop, resize images into posts. You can also create links, change font information and lots of other stuff without looking at or dealing with html. (More info on the ecto blog.) ecto 2.0 has a bunch of other cool features. Adriaan says it should be ready for general release of the OS X version in about two weeks. Until then... gloat.. gloat...

WQD Forums hit 100 »

Joichi Ito

Aug 27, 2004 - 11:57 UTC »

Categories:

In December, I announced that I quit drinking. I got a flurry of comments of support. Several of us who had decided to be sober, thought a group blog about quitting drinking would be interesting so we started We Quit Drinking, the blog. Soon, due to some weird Google magic, the blog became the first result for "quit drinking". A wide variety of people who were looking for support and help dropped in and commented. Jonas, who among other things works with addiction as a counselor, decided that a more private space, a message board requiring login might make sense so he created the WQD Forums. He announced today that WQD Forums has hit 100 members and have become a vibrant community of people who are in various stages of sobriety sharing and supporting. Since that day in December, I've received sooo much input and advice. Thank you. Some of it has been very useful and some, frankly, not so helpful. I have been to a few AA meetings and have really enjoyed them. On the other hand, I have not yet passed the first step, "Step One: We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable." At the meeting I said, "I think I have a problem, but I don't yet believe that I am powerless or that my life has become unmanagable." The interesting thing is, no one was upset. One AA'er later said, "In AA, we call that 'a quart short'". I think I will still drop into AA meetings because I love the stories and the comfortable atmosphere of sharing, but until I get to Step One somehow, I don't think I can really be a true member. It's been quite a journey hearing the wide variety of opinions about drinking. I've decided on the few advisors and approaches that I think work for me now in helping manage myself. My opinion may change and if I finally believe that I am powerless and my life has become unmanagable, I know I can always count on AA, which I now believe has an incredible power to save people from alcoholism. If you thinking you have a problem or know you have a problem, try dropping by WQD Forums and join us in our emerging community.

Conference call surfing »

Joichi Ito

Aug 27, 2004 - 10:56 UTC »

Categories:

I have my PowerBook on my insTand next to my bed with a clock screen saver alarm clock. Usually, I wake up before my alarm goes off and wake up the computer instead. As soon as my status on my IM clients goes from idle to available, I get a little flurry of requests for contact. "Did you see my email?" "When can we talk?" "Don't forget our conference call coming up." "We're on a conference call right now you might want to join." I queue up these real-time requests like some sort of air traffic controller, put on my headset hooked up to my Vonage phone and get started. Today, I started the morning with an conference call on the fly with a few people on a one of the many free conference call bridges. During the call, I got an IM that I might want to drop into another conference call in progress. After my first call, I joined the second conference call which was already well on its way. I got the URL of the wiki page of the agenda and notes via IM, scanned them, and made a few comments. Then I was off again to my next call which I had queued with someone on IRC.

My question is, am I a weirdo or an edge case for how people will work once we all have IM and voice and conference calls are free.

The Search Engine Belt Buckle »

Joichi Ito

Aug 26, 2004 - 06:50 UTC »

Categories:

I remember when I was Chairman of Infoseek Japan, I would get a weekly list of the top 100 search words. I remember loving this list. You could see watch trends and stuff, but mostly it made you realize just how sick people were. When I was around, the only US search term that beat adult content phrases was "Olympics" and the only Japanese query was "Tamagocchi" when it was all the rage.

Now uber-gadget-hacker Phillip Torrone has brought this experience to the street via the Search Engline Belt Buckle. It uses the SearchSpy service which shows real search queries and is provided by Dogpile, the metasearch engine.

I suppose this is slightly more useful than an RSS feed of my weight, but definitely harder to build.

Interview with Craig from Craigslist »

Joichi Ito

Aug 26, 2004 - 06:27 UTC »

Categories:

I blogged earlier about the sale of 25% of the stock of Craigslist to eBay. Out of context, some people might not understand why this requires explaining or someone with a casual understanding might think Craig sold out. Here's some more context. (And no, Craig has not "sold out".)

Craig is a very unique individual and this interview and his site are a testament to that. In March, on the way to SXSW, I was with a group which had an airline nightmare at SFO. Craig negotiated with the extremely unhelpful Mesa Airlines for the whole group of us and was amazingly effective. I was moved by how he insisted that we were a group and was not willing to settle for anything that left anyone behind.

Cory Doctorow @ Boing Boing
Craig of Craigslist interview
Wired Magazine ran an interview this month with Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist and an all-round mensch:

Google's touchy-feely corporate mantra is "Don't be evil." What's yours?
Give people a break.

A break from what?

A break from how difficult our lives are. It's like, if you're walking out of your apartment building and somebody is coming the other way with an armful of groceries, you hold the door. It feels good - it's the neighborly thing to do. And our species survives by cooperating.

What poses the major threat to that survival?

Kleptocrats and sociopathic organizations that have the almighty dollar as their only goal.

Link

USB weight sensor »

Joichi Ito

Aug 25, 2004 - 17:15 UTC »

Categories:

PhidgetsWeightSensor

Wow! A USB weight sensor. Now we can automatically add our weight to the sidebar and make RSS feeds of our weight changes. Who wants to write the mt-weightsensor plugin?

via Daiji

Current Mood: chipper
Current Weight: heavy
Listening to: You Trip Me Up by The Jesus and Mary Chain from the album Psychocandy

Army Okays Computer Spying »

Joichi Ito

Aug 25, 2004 - 17:05 UTC »

Categories:

Donna Wentworth @ EFF Deep Links
Army Okays Computer Spying
JetBlue ignited a huge privacy scandal when the news broke that the airline secretly provided more than 5 million passenger records to Torch Concepts, a military contractor. Yet the Army Inspector General Agency concluded [PDF] that JetBlue did not violate the Privacy Act. The reason: Torch never looked up individuals by name, but instead used a computer to dig through and analyze their private information.

This is quite disturbing. I guess this means that taking massive amounts of data and crunching through them to create "profiles" is OK. I wonder how small the clusters can be? Can they, for instance, profile companies, race, occupation, address or other kind of groupings for profiling?

There was a case in Japan where the Japanese government kept a list of Freedom of Information Act requesters in a list on a network with their backgrounds and this was found to be "legal".

I don't know enough about the JetBlue case to make a judgment on just how bad I think it is, but it seems to be part of a larger trend pushing the limits of the law.

Joi Ito's Web

Joi Ito's conversation with the living web.

Radio Taiso »

Categories:

Sell side advertising »

Categories:

Patenting punctuation »

Categories:

ecto goes wysiawyg »

Categories:

WQD Forums hit 100 »

Categories:

Conference call surfing »

Categories:

The Search Engine Belt Buckle »

Categories:

Interview with Craig from Craigslist »

Categories:

USB weight sensor »

Categories:

Army Okays Computer Spying »

Categories:

Reading »

PubPub »

Category Archives

Monthly Archives