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…

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…

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 sk…

‘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 sta…

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…

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…

Yoshikawa-san is the second “organic intellectual” of the Nico Nico Douga community that we meet (the first one was Hamano-san, you can read about him in an earlier post). Even though Yoshikawa-san never uses this word, “organic intellectu…

Wow! My head is still spinning from a whole afternoon and evening with a group of 9 Nico Chuus, all of them very generous and interesting. They gave 6 hours of their precious time, which they could have used otherwise to watch Nico videos.…

(We transferred this entry from another blog, originally it was written May 10th) Hamano-san, the media theorist of Nico Nico Douga!Hamano-san is a researcher at Nihon Gigei Inc, and one of the few, who has started to write the media theor…

Today I had an informative dinner with X (who wants to stay anonymous). He describes himself as a proud Otaku, and gives me an introduction into some of background knowledge that is necessary to understand Nico Nico Douga – most of the Jap…

Non-Japanese readers might ask, what the whole fuzz is about. Most Western observers of the Internet still do not know that something like Nico Nico Douga even exists at all. So I thought it might make sense to give a very basic introducti…

What a party! 12 hours after I, Goetz, have arrived from London, I find myself in Shinjuku in the middle of 70 crazy “Nico chuus” (=“Nico junkies", devoted Nico Nico Douga fans). These fans are here to spend a whole night of Karaoke. But t…

Our research on the Japanese video sharing platform Nico Nico Douga has started its hot phase: We conduct ethnographic research for 6 weeks in Tokyo and Osaka and talk about Nico Nico Douga with as much people as possible: How is it used? …