Quick note on the time delay on this blog

There are around ten posts queuing up. Takashiro-san and me are feeling bad about that. The last weeks have been very intense and very, very fruitful. New interviews come first, and as ethnographers we also have to write diaries, organise meetings, read material, watch and analyse Nico videos and comments, read your blogs (how can you be so fast?), learn Nico language, travel, think through ideas, understand technical details, organise stuff back home …

I just write this, in case anyone is wondering, why there are still so many amazing encounters unmentioned on this blog. They will come up, one by one, I promise. I write them one after the other, whenever I have time. This time delay is not ideal, but I see no other option at this point. Combining ethnographic research with a blog is a new experience, and a very good one. It ads a new form of feedback to ethnographic research. Please forgive that we are so slow!

Swinging Tags: A conversation with Koizuka Akihiko san

Koizuka-san is a programmer. No. This gives you the wrong idea. Better might be: Koizuka-san is the programmer. He created the original version of Nico Nico Douga in the course of 3 days, and has been the key person in its development ever since. To say it in his own words: “When I became a Nico Chuu, there was no other Nico Chuu”. The more technically minded Nico Chuu adore him. They credit him for the combination of complexity and simplicity that made Nico Nico Douga what it is today. A lot of the features of Nico Nico Douga show his hand writing. He programmed the comment function and he invented the unique version of tagging. Nico Chuus also value his approachability. I could experience this even before I had an interview by him: Koizuka-san became one of the first readers of this blog, and he bookmarked it from its start, so that other people would take notice as well.

"When I was a Nico Chuu, there was no other Nico Chuu" - Koizuka-san at Dwango office

In person, Koizuka-san is gentle and friendly, down to earth, precise, clear, logical and absolutely intelligent. When he talks you can feel clearly that you are listening to an outstanding brain. Even though he has a purely technical background, he often sounds more like an analytical philosopher. He was educated in the first cohort of the first high school in Japan that specialised in engineering. But even in this highly specialised technical environment he would often solve the tasks the teachers gave him, before they had stopped explaining the task. After his school he did not go to university, but became immediately a professional computer engineer, as it was believed at that time that a programmer has to quit his job with 35.

He is now beyond that age, but he still works for Dwango – a company that produces online entertainment content, mostly for mobiles, and is the parent company of Niwango (the company behind Nico Nico Douga). We meet him in the company and later we go for dinner. One of the things that impressed me most: I could feel the responsibility on Koizuka-san’s shoulders. Koizuka-san cares almost like a father for Nico Nico Douga and the community of Nico Chuus. Comparing him with a father might sound a bit odd, but it describes his position quite well: Of course he “only” created “generative algorithms”, and not the mad videos and comments on Nico Nico Douga, but he laid out the code, and since then he tries to develop and protect it.

Part of our interview is about the early days of Nico Nico Douga. Some of his stories are thrilling as suspense movies. One sticks to my mind particularly: The dramatic moment, when first the comment server of Nico Nico Douga broke down, and then, right at that moment, Youtube cut them off without notice. In the following days, the programmers of Niwango installed a new infrastructure, which allows Niwango to stream all videos by themselves. To do such a thing in days is quite an incredible technical achievement. By the way, up till today, Nico Nico Douga combines three different forms of servers – the web server provides the interface, a video servers streams the video data, and a third server provides the layer of comments.

Koizuka-san gives a paper on “How to create Nico Nico Douga” on a conference (“Itpro Challenge!”), then uploaded on Nico Nico Douga. Koizuka-san finds it generally strange to read comments about himself on the videos, but, as a 2channeller, he says he can take it.

Another early-days-story is the creation of the comment function on Nico Nico Douga. In this discussion we start to analyse the different levels of time that are incorporated in the original interface: The time of the video, the real time of the viewing, the time of the writing of the comments, the time of the scrolling and reading of the comments, the time of the archive of the comments (which is still not a real archive, as only the last 1000 comments stream through the video). Nowadays, these are not the only forms of time: You have also the time of the tags, the time of the evolving genres, the time of the user feedback, the time of the ranking … and Nicoscript has added even further layers of time, for example additional layers of automated feedback, while the users are watching the video. That the whole things still remains its natural and intuitive feel is almost a miracle and largely an achievement of the work of Koizuka-san.

I originally thought that the comments are limited because otherwise the screen would become too littered. This is the case, but there is more to it: For Koizuka-san the main reason was to keep the experience simple. If there are too many comments directly accessible for the user, the users might get scared, as they would theoretically have to know all the old comments, before they can add their own comments. Such old comments might refer to old forms of commenting or old references, that new users might not yet know anymore. The limitation of comments keeps them fresh and simple, and users can comment directly and affective. This is just one example of Koizuka-san’s style of programming: Simple ideas that make things simple for the user. Yet, as we all know, there is nothing as hard as this simplicity.

That comments scroll from right to left though the video, was decided from the start. However, how they would scroll, at what speed, and on which place in the video, was developed by Koizuka-san and his team. Scrolling is one way how the experience of Nico Nico Douga is kept simple and user friendly. As there are only a small numbers of comments displayed in any given moment of time, users can add their comments almost as if they would add a comment to a thread with one simple layer – the layer of the general tendency of the comments at any given moment of time. This form of a simple pseudo-thread-structure enables the users to read the comments and to react to them intuitively and directly.

A further simple, yet highly effective idea is the form of the daily ranking. It is based on how many users have added the video on their “Mylist” on the day. Mylist is Nico Nico Douga’s form of bookmarks. Users put videos on Mylist usually after they have seen it and when they plan to see it again. You can add each video to your Mylist only once. There are other possible forms of ranking too (according to the number of comments, for example), but Nico Chuus use the daily ranking based on Mylist as the first thing to go, when they check Nico Nico Douga. The ranking is so accepted, that Nico Nico Douga has re-gained a function that used to be exclusive to TV: When Nico Chus meet, they can discuss the videos on the ranking of that day, just as TV watchers can discuss what has been on TV yesterday evening.

I was curious to find out how videos make their way on this list directly after they are uploaded. Freshly uploaded videos appear for a short moment as “new arrival”, but afterwards they are in danger of drowning in the database. To prevent this, many uploaders ask their friends to add their freshly uploaded video to their Mylist, often via Mixi (an interesting dimension of social networks in the otherwise anonymous world of Nico Nico Douga). Until the video becomes known, uploaders have enough time to add their own comments. This is important because the first comments influence the later kuuki of the video. The freshly uploaded video is precious, almost like freshly fallen snow. Some users hunt these unknown videos. They want to comment first, and afterwards they have an interest in promoting the video. If all this does not work, the video can still generate a specialised audience through tags – and this specialised audience can then be the basis for a general success in the daily ranking.

Maybe Koizuka-san's most important achievement is the idea to limit tags to the amount of 10. I have already been raving quite a lot on this blog about the geniality of this idea, so I keep it short at this place. His original aim was to reduce the load on the database and keep the system simple to use, but he soon realised that there was much more to it: Limited tags, as I have written before, are key to the collective negotiation of the evolution of genres and subgenres. For Koizuka-san, tags are not only about description, but also “viewpoints”. In the beginning, Koizuka-san was concerned, when he noticed that tags“swing”on Nico Nico Douga: Competing viewpoints are set against each other. Koizuka-san spent quite a lot of time to develop a program that would “solve” this problem, until he realised that the collective intelligence of the users does indeed do the job better then any program can: At some point, one of the tags wins, and “sucks in” and therefore incorporates the tag that stood for the other side of the swinging movement. Hegel would be excited!

At the end of our long and at every moment fascinating conversation we started to think about how Koizuka-san might ‘copyleft’ his ideas. Although Koizuka-san is by now pretty famous and has entered the ranks of the programmer-stars of Japan, neither he as a person nor his ideas are known outside of Japan. He is keen to share his experiences and inventions, and I think it might become one of the tasks of the metadata project to communicate them. Some of these inventions play on a Japanese background, but they might still be a starting point to re-think our Western ideas around folksonomies or around the semantic web. This will need more space then what I can describe in the limits of one blog entry. But I hope this corporation can go on.

Kuuki dissected: A conversation with Kishino Yusuke san

I met Kishino-san in our first focus group. On his Mixi diary he described afterwards his experiences in this group (which is what many of our participants do). There, Kishino-san made some suggestions, how “kuuki” could have been analysed in deeper ways - basically he suggested the questions that I really should have asked! I am of course very grateful for such suggestions. My own stupid questions put my conversation partners often in the position of a tourist guide, who has to explain. However, on such Mixi conversations, this position of “tour guide for the gaijin” can be abandoned, and much smarter questions and answers can be developed. This is possible, because the Mixi diaries do not answer to me, but talk to each other (but they are at the same time kicked off by my own stupid first question). One of my own sensei in academia, Professor Bernd Juergen Warneken of University of Tuebingen, calls this effect “irritation”: I irritate with my stupidity, and therefore stimulate intelligence.

So you can imagine that I was keen to meet Kishino-san again. He is a student of Keio, one of the elite universities of Japan, and is in the process of doing a BA, which might be translated as `Sociology of the Information Society”. He is not yet blogging on Hatena and no member of Nico Nico Bu yet.

Kishino-san suggested that we should analyse Kuuki in much more detail (“Kuuki” is the word for “air, atmosphere” and describes on Nico Nico Douga the “vibe” of the comments). At the beginning of our conversation, Kishino-san introduced us to a two-dimensional model. Kuuki is generated on the one hand through the different forms of commenting (Danmaku, Mishearing, and so on), on the other hand through the different forms of expressing the comments (font size, font color, time, and so on). Different Kuuki are the result of different combinations of these two dimensions.

However, we soon started to notice in our conversation, that two dimensions are not enough to understand Kuuki on Nico Nico Douga. More and more dimensions popped up. So here is a nine-dimensional model (sorry, no possibility for simplicity here) for the dimensions of commenting, which generate, when they are all combined in certain ways, in the different forms of kuuki:

1. Genre of writing. Here you would have to differentiate between, for example, jokes, appreciation, lyrics or mishearing (were you deliberately write down the wrong words).

2. Mood. There are more affective and more analytic comments. Some comments are more playful, others are serious. Some are more for “neta” (the Japanese word for “material for indirectness, irony and jokes”, though this is a very difficult word to translate), some are more “beta” (which describes something like “directness, straightforwardness, honesty”: Beta is often, but not always used in derogative ways – TV soap operas can be described as “beta”, because they lack any sense of irony).

3. Innovation. Many comments are formalised, others are not. Some of them are the newest trend, others have been on Nico Nico Douga since a long time (or 2channel, for that matter).

4. Cryptic-ness. Many comments have hidden meanings. The four sign languages (Katakana, Hiragana, Chinese character and Western alphabet) provide in combination with the spoken Japanese a wide field for puns and double meanings of all sorts of kinds.

5. Dependence. A lot of comments relate directly to the video. However, this is not the only relation they can form. Comments can also take their own life, and the video in the background can loose its significance. There are comments that relate to other comments, to the tags, to the producers blurb, or to the “Nico market” in the bottom, especially when someone has actually bought something there. Such comments are often using arrows to show to what they relate to. There are also many ways, how the comments can relate to the videos: Some of them relate to questions in the subgenre of the surveys, which are asked inside some of the videos. Others are actually the movements of games, which are initiated by videos.

6. Visual style. This includes decisions such as font color and font size.

7. Timing. In some forms of kuuki, the exact timing is important, for example when you “sing along” by writing down the lyrics of the song. At other moments it might be important to announce something earlier, but this could also spoil the “kuuki” in other situations. Users can also decide between scrolling and static comments.

8. Degree of Danmaku-ness in the sense of amount. For some comments the sheer quantity is its reason to be there. A joke can get, for example, more funny, if it is written by many people.

9. Degree of Danmaku-ness in the sense of uniformity. Sometimes, but not always, it is very important to write something similar or even exactly the same like everyone else does. At other moments, it is important to ad another small variation. Exact repetition, which looks at the beginning very strange for Western eyes, can have lot of different function: it can enforce appreciation, cover the screen, increase the joke, and so on.

So far the dimensions of commenting. A Kuuki is formed by a combination of decisions on all the nine dimensions above. For different forms of kuuki, some dimensions become more important than others, but they are all present in some form. It is important to catch as much as possible of it. Otherwise you might get flamed, or worse, ignored. But it is not only a question of punishment. If you catch and take part in the kuuki, it makes you happy.

If you think that this is by now all far to complicated, you better stop reading now. It gets even deeper (thanks to the fantastic input and ideas of Kishino-san). The first thing that needs mentioning is: Some Kuukis become established genres. Such kuukis can have their own name (most famous is: Danmaku) and sometimes also get tags.

An analytic video in Nico Nico Douga that describes the background of some popular Danmakus (in his case, the comments are not 'real' but added by the producer of the video, who wants to explain some of the principles behind the Danmakus) - thanks Kishino-san for sending this!

The second thing that is important: There can be many different kuukis on one video. These different Kuukis in one video influence each other. The same thing happens of course in relation to tags: Certain tags might stimulate certain kuukis.

The third thing: It is also important at what moment of time a kuuki happens: There is, for example, a special kuuki at the end of a video, where people would appreciate the work of the uploader or the producer. In other versions of such a end-of-the-video-kuuki, commenters ironically congratulate each other for having made it so far, and actually watched the whole video to the end.

The fourth thing that you have to know: Each Kuuki itself has a biography, a time, a life cycle of its own. There are at least three phases that you can distinguish. In the phase of emergence, the general thrift of the kuuki is not yet decided. Then comes the phase of an established kuuki. In the late phase of a kuuki, it can slowly vanish or diminish. It can get further intensified, for example by switching to a full Danmaku. Or it can be changed or “broken” by people, who write against the grain.

Fifth and sixth: Kuukis have different age and different speed. The oldest videos also have old kuukis. Because most of them have not anymore high amounts of traffic, there is also a low speed of comments. The newest videos you find in the ranking. Videos, which are high in the ranking, have also a fast developing kuuki.

The seventh thing: Different users of Nico Nico Douga have different insights into this. There are varying levels of deepness of Nico-chu-ness. Some Kuukis are very hard to catch even for semi-experienced Nico Nico Douga users.

The eighth aspect is something we have totally overlooked so far: Nico Nico Douga incorporates a function that enables users to block certain comments. Blocked comments are not shown on their own personal screen. It is often used to make spam invisible (which has become more prevalent since the introduction of Nico Script, but more about that at another point)). However, users also create with this function their own personal kuuki: A common practice is to mark all derogative comments, so that they do not appear on the screen. This has, as you can imagine, all sorts of implications: users start their own private kuuki-dream-world, and loose the connection to the general thrift.

Last but not least: Most of this is tacit, implicit and incorporated knowledge. You have to feel it. If you think about it, the moment has passed.

So this was what I learned about Kuuki. Piu …

Kishino-sa, Takashiro-san and me did not only discuss Kuuki. We also discussed another interesting observation of Kishino-san: He thinks that Nico Nico Douga is not so much the structural equivalent of 2channel, but of Comic market: The famous offline event, where hundreds of thousands of Otaku gather several times a year to buy fan-made art (in the last market, there where 450.000 visitors and more than 20.000 amateur producers). Unlike 2channel, and like on comic market, the structure of Nico Nico Douga is based on the structure of producer-content-users. It does not pitch commenters directly against each other, as 2channel does. This might be one reason why the overall kuuki on Nico Nico Douga is so peaceful, and full of mutual appreciation.

Greasemonkey for tags? A conversation with Noriaki-san

Ginza is a different world from Ikebukuro, where I stay and hang out most of the time: While Ikebukuro is becoming the “real Akihabara” (Akihabra got so famous that Otakus tend to evade it more and more), Ginza is full of suits, lots of skyscrapers, and the whole area speaks of power and money. This is where Noriaki-san works, in a media lab for a big company that specialises in human resources. But he only works there since recently. Before, he was a student. As a student he became a Nico Chuu, and he also started to develop in his spare time Greasemonkey scripts for Nico Nico Douga. Nowadays he still develops them, though he has even less spare time. He publishes the scripts on his blog with the telling title: “We Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet”

So what is Greasemonkey? It’s a small program that enables you to add even smaller programs to your Firefox browser – the latter programs are called scripts. These scripts extract and visualise information of a website that otherwise would not be visible. They are written by an international community of Greasemonkey-fans, and generally freely available for download. Noriaki-san was the guy who developed such applications for Nico Nico Douga. He does so in intense cooperation, where, again, Koizuka-san is the most important conversation partner. So far there are three Greasemonkey applications, a forth one has just reached beta stage.

The first script visualises the amount of comments at each moment of time in the video. It does so in the form of a “heat map”. Red means: A lot of comments. Blue: Very little comments. It also allows you to download the videos with one click.

The first script of Noriaki-san: Heat map (image by Noriaki-san)

The second script enables you to see a “comment cloud”. Just as in a tag cloud, the size of the comments signal how often they were used in the past.

The second script of Noriaki-san: Comment cloud (image by Noriaki-san)

The third application is more complex and contains three graphs at once. These graphs symbolise (a.) the amount of recent comments, (b.) the time, when comments were put in and (c.) how many different people were commenting at one point of time: When one person puts in a lot of comments, the curve in the graph is high, but the circle is small. When many different people put in these comments, the circle gets bigger. Smart, ey? For us in the metadata project these three scripts are fascinating: Yet another form how comments are turned into metadata.

The third script of Noriaki-san: Nico Nico Analytics (image by Noriaki-san)

In the discussion that follows we come up with further ideas. I notice that all scripts of Noriaki-san analyse the data of one single video, and the manifold comments on it. But how about turning this relationship around and analyse one comment, and the manifold videos on which it is used? How about an application that does the same thing with tags? This could meet interest. We encountered in our focus groups and interviews growing interest of the users in tags. Users are passionate about them, are curious about them, and use them to express a lot of things form humour to fandom. So why not build an add-on that visualises their history? Noriaki-san cools my enthusiasm: This would be much harder to do, not only for technical reasons, but also because there would have to be a deeper access to the database of Niwango (he company behind Nico Nico Douga). If it gets too complicated, the whole script might also become too slow. So maybe this idea is not realisable. But we should try and find out.

Anyway. So far, the three existing applications are already interesting enough! Each one of them is used by several thousand people. So if you are curious, how you can get them, this is what you have to do: (1) Use Firefox. (2.) Go to http://www.greasespot.net/ and download and install Greasemonkey. (3.) If Greasemonkey is not activated automatically, you should do so. You can do this by clicking on the little monkey on the lower right corner of your Firefox browser: When it smiles, it is active. (4.) Go to Noriaki-san’s blog and download the scripts of the three add-ons. You can recognise the script by the end “.. user.js”. Just click on this link and it will install automatically.

Here are the URLs of the three posts on Noriaki-san’s blog, where you can find the links (the links with “user.js” in the end):
Comment cloud
Heat map
Nico Nico Analytics

Now you only have to go to Nico Nico Douga (if you do not know how to do this, the video on the post “So what is Nico Nico Douga?” will tell you how to do this). The scripts should appear automatically as part of Nico Nico Douga interface. The first two add-ons you see directly. The third one opens form the link below the video. Have fun in adding yet another layer to the many-layered world of Nico Nico Douga.

Dimensions of Nico Nico Douga: Talking to members of Nico Nico Bu

‘Nico Nico Bu’ is a network of around 200 bloggers on Hatena, who all blog about Nico Nico Douga. A lot of these blogs recommend specific Nico videos, but there are also bloggers, who tackle technical problems, generate Nico Nico Douga statistic, discuss the effectiveness of tags, or provide cultural and social research - Hamano-san and Yoshikawa-san, who I interviewed earlier, are prominent examples. The most prominent member of Nico Nico Bu is Koizuka-san, who is credited for inventing Nico Nico Douga.

Nearly all members of Nico Nico Bu are male, with the known exception of three female members. A lot have a professional background in computing. The members of ‘Nico Nico Bu’ also communicate extensively on twitter. In fact, the idea to form Nico Nico Bu first came up on twitter. As twitter is a less usual means of communication in the West, here is a quick explanation: Twitter allows you to send short text messages to an internet portal, and from there they are forwarded to the people, who decided that they want to follow you. In the case of Nico Nico Bu you have to imagine a constant stream of short messages filled with recommendations, personal thoughts, new ideas, gossip, or just updates what the members are on about at the moment.

Our meeting was a mix between a focus group and a Nico Nico Bu offline meeting. Next to Takashiro-san, our interpreter Graham and me there were six participants: Ohhoi-san (id:MuhKurutsu), whose blog is named after a pun of ‘old man’ and the widely known product name for a cockroach trap; Hide-san (id:hdkINO33), who is in his spare time a producer of ‘Imas’-videos (more about that later); Arimura-san (id:y_arim), who blogs about anime and also works as a critic for anime magazines; Kido-san, who showed us a lot of Nico videos on his ipod, Natsumikan-san (id:acqua_alta), who is credited for founding Nico Nico Bu; and Hanamigawa-san (id:ch1248), another very old member of Nico Nico Bu, and one of its co-founders.

The meeting lasted all in all about 8 (!) hours. The first three hours took the structure of a more formal focus group-ish discussion. The second four hours were accompanied with lots of beer and some nico-food: Moyashi (= bean sprout) are considered to be nico-food, because one character on the game Idolmaster is poor and always eats Moyashi at a special offer.

To summarise 8 hours of extremely interesting discussion in one post is impossible – especially when the discussion enters such “deep” levels as it did here. When a Nico Chuu says that a discussion is “deep”, details of lesser known meanings and styles are discussed. This means also: As soon as the discussion gets “deep”, I am lost. I have to be grateful that Graham-san, our translator, can take over in such moments, as he is capable of entering some of the more subtle regions of Nico talk. When I ask questions, the ‘deepness’ is gone, and people have to take the effort to explain very, very basic stuff.

Our first session started with a discussion about the favourite tags of our participants, and I could have easily listened to it for the rest of the scheduled time. Apart from many funny tags, I learned that tags can order themselves to express rising strength. One tag might express that something is weird, another one that is very weird, and so on. At the moment, the tag for the weirdest videos on Nico Nico Douga is called “failure of modern science”, but this tag will probably soon be topped by another tag. A month ago I discussed with my colleague Yuk Hui in London the possibility of tags, which do not only label something as “red”, but as “80% red”. Once more I make the experience that the users of Nico Nico Douga have already invented it.

The next part of our discussion entered the realm of “Imas”-videos. These videos use characters and software of the X-box game “Idolmaster”. The game asks you to produce pop idols by making the right decisions: Selecting the songs, her dress, choreographing her dance, etc…. It is very popular in Japan, because Idolmaster was one of the first 3D–based games that incorporated the look of 2D animation (which is where beauty lies in Japanese popular culture). Imas-mad-videos were also one of the first genres that became popular on Nico Nico Douga. As many members of Nico Nico Bu are also very early users of Nico Nico Douga, Imas-videos play a very special role on Nico Nico Bu.

One of the oldest Imas-mad-videos on Nico Nico Douga

Many Imas-mad-videos are user-produced music videos. As so many things on Nico Nico Douga, Imas-mad-videos have become by now very complex. Many different subgenres have evolved: Videos that make you laugh, videos that express the affection of the producer towards a specific character, videos that amaze with outstanding technical abilities, styles and production values, videos that stage encounters of different Imas-characters, footage of people, who play the original Idolmaster game, or videos that transfer the Imas characters into different settings (for example war settings). One Imas-video can of course belong to several of these subgenres at once.

Many Imas-mad-videos are spectacular showcases of the skills of their amateur producers, who do not only manipulate the character and the songs, but also show the skill in lip-synchronising (which has to be done by hand and takes a lot of time), camera patterns, editing, effects and inserting different background. There is by now fan-produced software that helps you doing this. Some of the producers have risen to fame – Wakamura-P is probably the biggest star among them. Recently he appeared on a NHK TV show, where he was hiding behind a mask to protect his anonymity.

One and a half years later: The newest Imas-mad-video by Wakamura-P

The original game Idolmaster contains 12 characters. All members in this group know all 12 characters, and they stress that to fully enjoy the videos, you have to understand, who they are. When different characters perform with each other in one music video, this might, for example, encapsulate an implicit back-story of their complicated relations with each other: They might have a crush on each other, or might be burning with jealousy. Some of these personal traits have also developed beyond the game. “Miki”, for example, was originally more of a slacker-type, but recently she has started to work harder for her career, and you can see this represented in her newest music videos (bear in mind: these are all user-produced videos of avatars, not “really real” people).

The whole discussion of the Imas-genre was seriously undermined by my ignorance: How can you discuss the details of the style of a specific producers, or the latest turns in the development of a character, when the gaijin in the room constantly asks questions like: “Could you please explain me, how many characters there are?”. So the members of the group were probably quite relieved when our discussion moved on to the more general territory of Nico Nico Douga as a whole.

During this discussion we came up with a model that helped me to map the video content on Nico Douga. There are at least three basic dimensions of video content. The first dimension is constituted by the different genres, subgenres, and sub-subgenres, which are, in turns organised in tags. Examples of the broad overall genres would be “Imas-mad”, “Toho”, or “Tried singing”. An example of a subgenre would be the videos of a specific Imas character. So far, so easy.

The second dimension is formed by style: Any of these genres and subgenres could use 3D animation, original footage, 2D drawings, interactive quizzes or wild forms of content collages. Again, these styles all have sub-styles. Videos can also be edited faster or slower - there is a whole culture in Nico Nico Douga of re-editing and condensing longer videos into ever-shorter units (these videos are called “for busy people” or, when they are only some seconds long, “for really busy people”). This example also shows, that styles consolidate themselves through tags, too.

Many genres have a tendency to adopt a particular style: Imas-mad-videos, for example, are mostly 3D animation. However, the distinction of style and genre still helps to bring a certain order into this confusing field, as there are also fan-made 2D drawings of Imas characters out there. To take another example: The famous Abe character (that is: a subgenre) started as 2D drawing, but he is now a 3D animation, and you can also find a lot of filmed footage of people posing and dancing like Abe.

The third dimension is the difference between user-collected and user-generated content. User-collected videos would typically consist of content found on television or Youtube. Purely user-generated content would be a self-drawn Manga with a newly invented character that is arranged in slides (you can find quite a lot of this o Nico Nico Douga). However, most content on Nico Nico Douga is situated somewhere in between: Imas videos, for example, use commercial software with set characters, but create new narratives, develop the characters further and so on. You also have to take into account that a lot of videos are re-edited versions of re-edited versions of re-edited versions.

If you look at particular videos, you will often see at different points many different genres and styles, and these videos mix also at different points different forms of user-collected and user-generated material on different levels. However, again I would argue that this is not something that undermines this model, but you can still explain this though it. These three dimensions are of course not the only dimensions of Nico Nico Douga. There is, for example, the distinction of “pure” genre in the one hand, and staged encounters between characters of different subgenres or genres on the other. But for now I want to not spoil the simplicity of this model.

There is one very important limitation to bear in mind: This model only enables you to map the video content. Comments are excluded. This is nothing trivial. Comments are just as important on Nico nico Douga as the videos themselves. In fact, I tend to say that comments are much more complicated than the video content. But again: This is another reason to keep the map of the video content as simple as possible.

After it took me already so much word to explain this simple model, I better postpone some of the other highlights of our discussion to later posts, e.g. the whole topic of illegal content and the discussion of the Japanese-ness of tagging. Instead, I want to finish this post with a simple, yet for me astonishing fact: Half of the members of this discussion group have installed a second screen next to their main screen to be able to always watch Nico Nico Douga in the background, while they are working on other stuff on their main computer. Don’t you think this shows serious commitment?

Tetsugaku (= philosophy) on Nico Nico Douga: More about tags

Each time I do a focus group, my list of questions gets longer: By now, the questionnaire contains 15 pages, and in the end of each focus group I have to admit to myself that I not even managed to ask one quarter of these. Instead, I often talk about new stuff that I never even thought I could ask about: It ranges from the properties of the interface to background knowledge about Japan. Of course this is very humbling. However, I also take it as a good sign. Each new question is always already an answer in another respect. This focus group, which was again recruited through "Mixi", was no exception.

In this post I want to focus once again on tags. Perhaps the most important shift in the last two weeks has been this new focus on tags. To put it very simply: I came here to research the comments on the videos, but tags have now become just as important. Tags consolidate genres and subgenres. I can therefore only understand tags properly, if I can understand the huge amounts of videos that describe the tag, just as the tag describes them. As you can imagine, there is no way I can do that myself. In such a situation I really need help from the focus groups.

A first tag that I became obsessed about in this particular focus group was the tag “Kaigai no hannou” (=“response of overseas”). This tag is mostly used for videos where Non-Japanese people talk about Japanese culture – everything from anime to robots. Some of this is just found footage, often from Youtube. Other comments are generated on purpose by the uploaders: They put Japanese Nico videos on Youtube, and then re-collect these videos after a while. While they do so, they take screen grabs of the comments on Youtube (which are, of course, below the video), and these screen grabs are then inserted into the original Nico video. You can guess already, what is most amusing: Comments that describe Japanese as crazy. What these commenters on Youtube do not know: They are watched, laughed about and commented on here. Kind of cool, isn’t it?

A second tag I want to introduce here is “Sakusha wa shukusei” (= “the creator should be cleaned up”). Such videos are “dangerous videos”, and often contain footage of political figures such as Vladimir Putin or Pope Benedict. Both are viewed as powerful and scary: “If you get Putin angry, he might come and destroy you”. Communist iconography in general can be found under the tag “Doushi” (=”comrade”). Here you can find lots of Putin, but also Lenin and Stalin, and, rather confusingly, quite a bit of Mussolini as well. Another tag that relates to the “Doushi” as subgenre is “Joshi” (= “female”). Such videos belong in turns to a larger genre of videos that use a known anime-theme-song and provide it with new words. While these user-gerated music videos are done a lot, “Joshi”-videos relate to history. In the beginning, their words were mostly about themes from the Edo period, but more recently, communist and especially Russian history has become a big topic. Anime characters singing about Stalin: Hmm… there is definitely need for more analysis here!

One tag that I became particularly obsessed about is the “Tetsugaku”-tag (=”philosophy”) – this is a tag, which also some of the members in our focus group liked particularly. If you enter this tag, you get some of the share of Deleuze, Foucault and Agamben that you might expect. However, such videos are the minority. Next to them you find all sorts of other videos. The members of our focus group explained to me that many of these videos make you ask questions like “Why am I watching this video?” or “Why does this video even exist?” – basically videos that make you think. So many of these videos provide an interesting meta-level (which is, of course, by far not the only one on Nico Nico Douga). “Tetsugaku”-videos are often tagged because they make you reflect about Nico Nico Douga and your own practice of uploading, commenting and watching (though at the same time this is of course also a joke).

One video under the "Tetsugaku"-tag shows a wet cat: In the comments you will find often a lot of speculation on what this cat might think, while it gets wetter and wetter. A philosophising wet cat: Deleuze would have been probably been very proud of this new media-neighbour.

A wet cat, asking herself some very, very deep questions

So tags can obviously re-contextualise videos. Sometimes this is done to make a joke. At other times, such a re-contextualisation can stimulate new forms of “kuuki" and thus generate new forms of comments. At the same time it also seems to be fun to try to “take over” a tag. In such a case the meaning of a whole tag is changed. “Tetsugaku” has definitely become more fun since it relates to more than only French philosophy.

Two members of our group were particularly keen to establish the “Testugaku”/philosophy-tag as a tag for “pants-wrestling”-videos. The latter videos re-edit footage of one particularly cheesy American gay porn movie, where several bodybuilder-types engage in semi-naked wrestling activities before they move on to more serious business. If you are interested: You can find such videos not only under “Tetsugaku”, but also under “Mori no yousei” (=“woodland fairies”). The reason for the latter name is, of course, that these pants-wrestling guys are anything but woodland fairies.

As I have already started to talk about “pants-wrestling”, I might just as well mention that there are many different forms on Nico Nico Douga, how straight people enjoy gay content. Apart from “pants-wrestling” there are of course the videos that belong to the famous genre of “boys love”. This genre is decades old. It originally referred to Mangas, which depict romantic love between young boys. Traditionally, it is mostly consumed by girls, or, if it gets more explicit, by grown up women.“Boys love” and “pants-wrestling” seem to form two opposite sides of a spectrum. Nico Nico Douga would not be Nico Nico Douga if you would not find by now quite a few videos where pants-wrestlers and “boys love”-characters are depicted against each other. Such videos are made to stimulate tag- and comment-wars. In a way, “boys love” is more a female, and “pants-wrestling” is more a straight-male form of obsession with male gayness. However, one has to be careful to make such fast conclusions. At least some of the girls in our group stressed that they also enjoy the pants-wrestlers a lot.

Placed in the middle of this spectrum you can find the gay figure, which is the by far most popular on Nico Nico Douga: “Abe”. He originated as a hero in a Manga, which was directed to a gay audience. On Nico Nico Douga, Abe became everybodies darling. Nowadays you can see him most often in the form of a 3D animated character that likes to dance. His movements are slightly camp, but not too much. He also has multiplied himself into the Abe dancers, which all look and dance like Abe. His dance moves became so popular, that some members of our focus group have attended offline events devoted to him, and it will be hard to find a party of Nico Chuus, where the Abe dance moves are absent.

All this was - you might guess my point by now - developed under the roof of a tag. Tags first consolidate, and as they consolidate, they stimulate the production of a whole range of content that fills them. However, when they have become strong, they get undermined again. This way they remain interesting, even when their meaning has become pretty established. Tags are alive on Nico Nico Douga.

OK. So far the tags. Once more I am already going on for far too long, and there is more stuff to write about that is queuing up. This was a rather arbitrary selection of some of the tags we discussed in this particular focus group. There are of course thousands and thousands of tags on Nico Nico Douga. Just as important: Whatever I said here, might already become different in some weeks, because tags are always on the move on Nico Nico Douga. So this is just a glimpse into the world of tags. But maybe you can understand why I become so obsessed about them.

A first crack on theory: Reading Nico Nico Douga with Gerard Genette

Inspired by the discussions with Takashiro-san, Hamano-san and Yoshikawa-san, I think it might be just about time to start and come forward with some of my own initial ideas, how an analysis of Nico Nico Douga could be pushed forward. What follows is of course radically preliminary, not only because I still know far too little about Nico Nico Douga, but also because it is only the very beginning of a theoretical analysis.

One way into the analysis could be through the work of the French structuralist and literary theorist Gerard Genette, who wrote in the late 70ties and 80ties extensively about the relations that connect texts to other texts. Genette’s term for the multiplicity of the relations between texts is “transtextuality”, and you can read more about it in his works “Introduction a l’Architexte” (1979), “Palimpseste. La Litterature au second degree” (1982), and “Seuils” (1987) – the latter two are translated into German, and the last one, as “Paratexts” (1997), also into English. Genette develops in my opinion in these works a precise alternative to the more known ideas of Julia Kristeva on this topic. Attention: He uses his terms slightly different to her.

Gerard Genette

Genette distinguishes five basic forms of transtextuality: (1.) “Intertextuality” is the presence of one text in another one – a quote would be the most obvious example. (2.) “Paratexts” are all texts that frame the main body of texts, e.g. titles, introductions, cover blurbs or footnotes. (3.) “Metatextuality” is given, when one text talks about another one, such as in reviews or literary analysis. (4.) “Hypertextuality” is based on the transformation of one text into another one – the relationship of James Joyce’s Ulysses and Homer’s Odyssey is a famous example. Finally, (5.) “Architextuality ” is Genette's term for genre – e.g. the fact, that a text is a romantic poem.

Genette’s theory is of course much more complex – in fact, this framework is laid out in the first two of the all in all 80 chapters of his book on “Palimpseste”. However, I think that even this basic framework can help us to understand one side of Nico Nico Douga better: I can not think of any other larger body of texts and any other interface that ever presented us with such a dense and complex network of transtextuality. Nico Nico Douga is almost pure transtextuality. If you strip it away, there is nearly nothing left.

In a simple form, one can just overlay the five categories of Genette with the different forms of texts on Nico Nico Douga: Intertextuality can be found in the samples in the videos. Paratexts are on Nico Nico Douga all the informations about the videos, from viewing numbers to the blurb of the “Ps” (= producers in Nico Nico Douga speak). Metatexts are the comments on the video. Hypertextuality can be found in the manifold transformations of one text into another one – every video of Hatsune Miku embodies all other videos of her. Architextuality is, for example, present in the form of tags and categories.

However, in my opinion such a simple approach would fall short of Nico Nico Douga’s complexity. The next step is, to apply all 5 forms of transtexuality to all forms of text that you can find on Nico Nico Douga. Even though, for example, a comment is obviously a metatext, a comment can also be a paratext or a hypertext (“hypertext” is used here of course in the terminology of Genette, and not in the one by Berners-Lee). On the other hand, Metatextuality cannot only be found in comments, but also in all other forms of text on Nico Nico Douga.

As this is the blog of the metadata project, I might just as well take metatextuality as an example to demonstrate what I mean. Not only the comments are metatexts. Also music, for example, often provides a form of metatextuality on Nico Nico Douga. Producers and uploaders would sometimes take the footage from a different source, and then comment on it via strange music. At other times, the producer would film him- or herself, and then add ironic sound effects to this (e.g. strange noises, when certain things happen in the video).

Other forms of metatextality can be found in tags. From Hamano-san I have learned that tags, and especially tag-wars, form an additional layer of comment. This layer of tag-comments ads to the comment-comments on top of the video. Some Tag-comments address the video (e.g.: “Gets interesting after 4 minutes and 21 seconds”). Such tag-comments might then be commented on by further tag-comments. Tags are mainly a form of architextuality, but also a form of metatextuality.

This list could go on. For now if might be enough to turn the analysis in the other direction and have a quick look at the comments themselves: Comments, which are the most obvious example of metatextuality, are not only metatext. Some of them are “about” the video, but many other comments seem to more write along the video. An example are the moments, when Nico chuus write in their comments the text of the song that is playing. What is the status of such comments? Other comments deliberately mis-hear the original text: They are examples of Genette’s ideas about hypertextuality.

Genette stresses that transtextuality is often implicit. It does not have to be right in your face (but it has to be hinted at by the producer). A prominent example for this is the comment "nice boat" (Non-Nico-Chuus: see the entry "And it started with a party" for an explanation). Every "nice boat"-comment points to the original one, but yet it is also a transformation of it - again, we have an example of hypertextuality. Comments can obviously have many different layers. And of course all examples that i have used here are only scratching the surface: When Nico chuus do "deep Nico talk". they entangle transtextuality on much, much deeper levels.

Well, I stop at this point, but I guess you can see that I could ramble on like this for ages. Such ramblings show in my view the potential, but also the limits of Genette's theory for an analysis of Nico Nico Douga. Genette’s theory applies very well, but there is also a danger that I end up with a long list of categorisations, all neat and logical, but in itself nothing more then mere descriptions with theoretical terms. So how do I proceed from here? I guess this is the moment when the ideas of Hamano-san and Yoshikawa-san come in.

For the purposes of an analysis of Nico Nico Douga, transtextuality has to be re-thought under the headlines of “pseudo-synchronicity” and “evolution”. Transtextuality on Nico Nico Douga is not one between canonical texts in literary theory, but between user-generated video content. Whereas the evolution of genres takes centuries, successful tags can form and spread in days, even hours. Transtextuality has taken a computed and partly automated form. Evolution has taken speed and became part of a giant role-playing game. Presence in the form of pseudo-synchronicity is a central outcome of this.

I cannot outline yet how this will work out in detail – inserting the dimension of time into a structuralist theoretical framework can indeed be trick business - , but I guess you get the direction. If ever I arrive at this point, I think there waits another trap. Such a model of Nico Nico Douga might catch its complexity, but it is also in danger of falling into what I might call the “Look how complex this fan culture is, I became a real fan of it”-trap. What papers like this lack is a certain degree of critical distance.

Nico Nico Douga does not provide an easy opportunity for over-simplified critical analysis. Such forms do not apply, because, at least for me, Nico Nico Douga seems to be in fact pretty inclusive, open and democratic, non-hierarchical and egalitarian, surprisingly anti-narcisitic and non-individualistic, relatively un-sexist and un-nationalistic, often subversive in many ways, and in its core still mostly uncommercial and genuinely playful. So how should we add a critical stance? And does it have to be added for its own sake?

Siegfried Kracauer (taken from: Loewenthal, Leo. An Unmastered Past. 1987)

I am still undecided, and I can only offer another hunch here: Siegfried Kracauer’s work on the “cult of distraction” on the German mass culture in the 1920ties might provide some ideas how to push the analysis deeper into the realm of critical theory. What happens, if the “mass ornament” (Kracauer) becomes a mass-produced ornament – an ornament, which takes the form of user-produced and constantly evolving transtextuality? Such are the questions that might have to be addressed at the end of this analysis of Nico Nico Douga.