Joi Ito's Web

Joi Ito's conversation with the living web.

I emailed Governor Domoto yesterday to let her know I moved in and became a Chiba resident. She emailed me back and said she was going to be in the neighborhood and would drop by our new house the day after tomorrow. Yikes! Nothing like a little pressure to unpack and clean up the house. I wonder what the protocol is with the neighborhood. This is like some kind of Japanese protocol adventure game...


I was noodling around trying to organize "the space" in my head and put this picture together. The x axis is the "context". IE low context is stuff like CD's and books which don't change, are worth approximately the same amount to most people and don't have much timing or personal context. The far right is very personal, very timing sensitive, high context information such as information about your current "state". Then there is everything in between. The top layer is the type of content sorted by how much context they involve. The next layer is how they are aggregated and syndicated. Below that are substrates that are currently segmented vertically, but could be unified horizontally with open standards. Anyway, just a first path. Thoughts and feedback appreciated.

UPDATE: Changed color to red and edited the examples to be brand agnostic.

The Japan Time
'REGAINING PUBLIC SAFETY' - Cops to sniff out illegal foreigners in Tokyo

By HIROSHI MATSUBARA, Staff writer

Immigration authorities, police and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government said Friday they will take joint action to halve the number of foreigners without visas in the capital within five years.

The Justice Ministry's Immigration Bureau, the bureau's Tokyo branch, the metropolitan government and the Metropolitan Police Department issued a joint statement saying they would cooperate more closely toward this goal.

They believe that half of the estimated 250,000 undocumented foreigners in Japan live or work in Tokyo.

"An increasing number of visaless foreigners engage in serious crimes, and it is pointed out that the problem is closely linked to organized crime by foreigners," Justice Minister Daizo Nozawa asserted during Friday's news conference.

This is all part of Governor Ishihara's ethnic cleansing of Tokyo thing. He's blaming all of the horrible crimes on "foreigners" and using that to ramp up police force and will probably lead to increased intrusions of privacy.

I do know that there have been increased activity of foreign organized crime groups in Japan, but his talking about "criminal DNA" in foreigners is horrible and will just help justify people in looking away when heavy handed police tactics are used on foreigners in Japan. Bad bad bad...

Loic, a French entrepreneur blogger writes about his experience starting companies. Good stuff. I totally agree with the importance of execution over ideas. That's why, although I find my "competition" reads my blog, it's better if people know what I'm doing as long as I'm moving fast enough. ;-)

Yesterday Mizuka and I went to visit our new neighbors bearing simple gifts. Our house is in the center of the village and was owned by the head family of the village until they had financial trouble and had to sell to our previous owners. Almost all of my neighbors are spin-off families of the same household. It's quite a small, tight community. It appears that we have have to join the community. This means semi-annual drinking feasts with the neighbors, help with funerals and weddings and a lot of socializing. Since all of the neighbors have the same last name, they are all called by their role in the community or their job. Everyone seems to know what everyone else is doing and there really isn't any privacy. On the other hand, everyone seems to look out for each other and are always available to help. No one locks their doors and there are eyes everywhere.

One of the women we met was the widow of the man who built our house and cried when she talked about how much effort was made by him and the community in building our house. There seems to be a great deal of history that we're stepping into and Mizuka and I have to be very sensitive not to screw up our entry into this community.

It's quite a shift from the anonymous existence one leads in Tokyo, but it feels like a microcosm of the rather closed community culture of Japan. Comfortable if you conform, but quite difficult if you don't...

Everyone has been very supportive in helping me deal with the comment spam issue. Thanks everyone.

We've installed MT-Blacklist plug in for now. I'm generally against blacklist type filters, but it looks like the best solution for now. I will wait for MT Pro to deal with it in a more elegant way.

I thought my troubles were over when I got two comments just now with "interesting..." and "page-rank?" on my last two post. The links were to a casino site. These comments were probably not machine scripted like the other comment spam, but they added no value to the comments and the casino site URL made me feel that they had posted the comments for the purpose of trying to steal page rank on Google. I have a feeling some bloggers also post comments on my blog just to get links to their sites.

My current policy on this issue is, if you post something on my blog that clearly adds no value to the conversation and if your URL is a gambling site, a porn site, a pharmaceutical site or some other obviously spam friendly commerce site, I will delete the post and add you to the blacklist. I will discourage bloggers to post opinion-less or off-topic posts just to get links. I continue to encourage people to post their opinions whether they are supportive or critical and of course I will not delete critical comments.

My policy may change, but this is it for now.

A few days ago, I asked Nanjo-san if he could give a few of us a special tour of the new Mori Art Museum before it opens this Friday. Lisa has some notes and photos on her new blog. This Art Museum will be largest in Japan. It's quite amazing what they've done and what they plan to do. Look forward to visiting often.

I wrote about page slapping in August in the context of IRC. Grant just chumped that Wired Jargon Watch just listed it in the context of email. I wonder who coined the word.

Last night was my first night in our new home in the countryside. We have well water and no city water. We have a septic tank and no sewage. We have a propane tank for energy (hope to replace soon with solar). I do have ADSL and wifi though. ;-)

This morning I woke up to the sound of song birds and insects. In fact, the sound of insects is non-stop. There are lots and lots of bugs. There are huge spiders and things jumping and crawling all over our lawn. This morning Mizuka pointed out a preying mantis. She said there were two of them hanging around until yesterday. I found the remains of papa Mantis on the floor. It's probably time for Mrs. Mantis to lay her eggs. Next year we will have a zillion baby Mantis's around.

I used to love insects (at least most insects), but I had grown used to not seeing too many of them in Tokyo. I'm going to have to get used to this total insect immersion. On the other hand, it is so quiet here, I slept better last night than I have in months.

We just had another earthquake. I'm glad I'm in my new house in Chiba surrounded by big trees and a bamboo forest. Researchers in Japan says that Tokyo is overdue for THE BIG ONE soon. Kevin Marks says it's all powerlaws and they're not periodic. You can keep your powerlaws. I'm glad I moved out of Tokyo. I'll wait until it's flattened again before I move back.