Big in Japan – How the Japanese is leading the "blogalization" phenomenon

Although little attention is paid to this important phenomenon, the blogosphere is turning global in a big way. This "blogalization" is led, surprisingly, by Japan's internet mobile users. As of today more people are writing blogs in Japanese than in any other language, and more blogs are being read by Japanese, surpassing the Americans, Koreans, British and French.

A new blogging study, conducted by StrategyOne, shows that: In an average week, almost three quarters (74%) of the Japanese Internet users who participated in the survey said they read blogs at least once a week. This is significantly more compared to the other countries studied, with just under a half (43%) in South Korea, just under a quarter in the UK (23%) and France (22%) and just over a quarter in the USA (27%).

In Japan only a minority claimed to not read any blogs (26%), far less than other countries such as South Korea (57%), the UK (73%), France (68%) and the USA (69%), according to the study. Japan has the highest proportion (25%) of people who read blogs every day, compared to all countries participating in this research.

English, while being the language of the majority of early bloggers, has fallen to less than a third of all blog posts today. About 37% of the today blog posts are writing in Japanese and 15% are in Chinese, according to the latest data from Technorati, the leading blogs search engine that currently tracking 72.3 million blogs worldwide.

Japanese bloggers appear to write shorter posts more often, probably as a result of blogging from mobile phones. Today, more than 70 million people in Japan are using their mobile devices to surf in the internet, partly as a result of the popularity of mobile Internet services like NTT DoCoMo's i-mode.

52% of users in Japan use the mobile web regularly, compared to a 10% in Europe, according to a new research by Forrester. “When it comes to mobile services, Japan is still ahead of Europe by a whopping five years, even though operators in both regions introduced mobile Internet services at roughly the same time in the late 1990s,” said Forrester analyst Niek van Veen.

“With the incredible growth of the blogosphere, brands and media companies worldwide realize that their communications environment is also in for big changes,” said Peter Hirshberg, Technorati chairman. “The clout that bloggers have developed the U.S. is going global. The lessons that marketers have begun to learn here - get a clue, listen, participate, engage - will soon apply everywhere.”