The British media theorist and sociologist Adrian McKenzie has recently sketched out his idea about the Internet as a medium of lists. I found his talk on a workshop at Goldsmiths highly inspiring. It struck me that rankings in particular,…

Like most video community websites, Nico Nico Douga does not have one single form, but a plurarity of rankings. The most important form is called, tellingly, “ranking”, but it is not the only one. The “ranking” button is placed in the uppe…

Triggered of by the launch of Nico Nico Douga’s German and Spanish version, I asked myself in the last post (“Wunderbar – Nico Nico Douga goes German….”) two questions that I evaded up to this point: How Japanese is Nico Nico Douga? And wh…

Nico Nico Douga has now released a Spanish (http://es.nicovideo.jp/) and a German version (http://de.nicovideo.jp/). The German translation of the interface is still a bit shaky, but hey, who would complain? This makes life so much easier …

Kanamaru-san (id:kana0355) is a pragmatic linguist based in the languages department of Kyoto University. The same Kanamaru-san is also a deep Nico Chuu, who has not one, but two Nico Nico Douga premium accounts, so that both he and his wi…

Later on I learned that the pre-party had started at 9.30 … 9.30 AM that is! We arrived at 3PM, but even then it was a surprising sight, as I would normally associate dance ecstasy in a club with nighttime, but not with Sunday afternoons. …

Arimura-san is new. He is new in many respects. He is new on Nico Nico Bu, the community of Nico Nico Douga bloggers on Hatena. His popular blog, which existed before he entered Nico Noco Bu, provides a new take on anime: Faster, and more …

“Lucky Star” is an anime series produced by Kyoto Animation. Some say that it was the first major anime series, which was produced deliberately for the Nico-Nico-Douga-age: Lots of dancing, for example, and its lyrics are fast, and therefo…

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…

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.…

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…