Nico Nico Douga’s ranking is one form of ranking. Rankings are one form of lists. So what is a list? What looks like a simple question turned out to be a rather complicated one. To develop a sytsematical approach, I moved up even one branc…

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…

There is hardly a week without a new twist in the development of Nico Nico Douga. But even said that, the last weeks were particularly exciting for us at the metadata project. Niwango, the company behind Nico Nico Douga, re-organised its r…

With Sikii-san (id:sikii_j) we were able to interview another highly prominent Imas-blogger. Sikii-san is based in Kyoto, but Takashiro-san originally met him in Tokyo, where the members of Nico Nico Bu organised an offline meeting to meet…

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…

We didn't really plan to do a focus group in Kyoto. I wanted to see temples, eat, sit at the river, do all the classical Kyoto things, before the research would continue in Osaka. However, Takashiro-san soon found out that many Nico Nico B…

Nico Nico Douga is taking another major step. On July the 2rd Dwango announced an agreement with three associations of film and video industry, to delete all videos that infringe copyright, including MAD movies. Then, after the release sho…

Today is my last day in Japan. I will keep on posting about the amazing encounters that I had in the last weeks (I mentioned the time delay on this blog before). There is good stuff to come: Encounters with the likes of Shikii-san, Taitoku…

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 …

Midouoka-san is a much debated figure on the Japanese Internet. He has gained his fame on 2channel. Though 2channel is usually a place for anonymous posting, Midouoka-san became a known figure (don’t ask me, how he did that). He says he li…

Oregon-based tech blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick has just posted an introduction into Nico Nico Douga on ReadWriteWeb. The article compares Nico Nico Douga favorably to Youtube Annotations, which allows uploaders to add comments to their own…

Hikawa-san is probably the most prominent Anime critic of Japan. You can find his articles in prominent magazines, he has written several books and you can also see him often on TV. His writing is known for having a high analytical depth: …

It was only a matter of time until the idea of Nico Nico Douga would be taken up in Mainland China. Now, a website seems to do exactly this: AcFun.cn takes up speedYou can access the website directly without becoming a member. As you can s…

“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…

It is a good feeling to be as an Academic research project up speed with Wired (US edition) ...http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-06/mf_hiroyuki?currentPage=1The article focuses in large parts on Hiroyuki, and gives a useful i…

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…

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? …