Disqus - Latest Comments for Ken Y-N

Re: Best Wordpress Plugins – Nominations and Results

Ken Y-N — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 20:14:21 -0000

Great idea Andy! My nominations would be Bad Behaviour and Exec PHP, as well as, of course, Spam Karma.

I really should add DoFollow to my comments too.

Re: Best Wordpress Plugins – Nominations and Results

Ken Y-N — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 20:14:21 -0000

Great idea Andy! My nominations would be Bad Behaviour and Exec PHP, as well as, of course, Spam Karma.

I really should add DoFollow to my comments too.

Re: 7+7 Reasons Why Google Buying FeedBurner is a Match Made in Heaven & Hell

Ken Y-N — Tue, 22 May 2007 19:52:57 -0000

Andy, I don't know why you can't get into FAN - I got the invite with only about 600 readers.

Having said that, I've just turned off FAN this week. After two months I'd barely made $7 out of about - ack, now that I've turned off FAN I can't check the stats - 10,000 or more impressions. Most of the ads were pretty naff and had geo-targetting, so I don't actually know what my actual "Live" circulation is. They also have an end-of-the-month recalculation of your revenue which seemed to knock about 20% or more off my meagre take.

Re: 7+7 Reasons Why Google Buying FeedBurner is a Match Made in Heaven & Hell

Ken Y-N — Tue, 22 May 2007 19:52:57 -0000

Re: 7+7 Reasons Why Google Buying FeedBurner is a Match Made in Heaven & Hell

Ken Y-N — Wed, 23 May 2007 03:26:58 -0000

Andy, I didn't get an invite per-se, I just popped into the Monetize tab and there was the offer to join. I joined as soon as I got the offer, two months ago or so. I checked the tab maybe once per month before that. I've been with FB for over a year, so perhaps that also counts for something?

Looking around the web there seems to be people making a decent amount through FAN, but even though I had a number of $6 CPM ads I never really got enough views. Perhaps if I was making three or more posts per day I could have tripled my income to a slightly less pitiful amount. These FAN earnings I quoted are about 2% of my total, so it won't be missed by me.

Re: 7+7 Reasons Why Google Buying FeedBurner is a Match Made in Heaven & Hell

Ken Y-N — Wed, 23 May 2007 03:26:58 -0000

Re: Blogrush – 7 Critical Mistakes

Ken Y-N — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 18:56:29 -0000

Hi Andy,

I was reluctant to sign up for BlogRush, but your post convinced me!

I'm still worried abut how relevant the links displayed will be, and I always have a difficult time categorising my blog! I eventually put myself under "Business". Hopefully that can be edited later, or the categories expanded, or multiple categories selected, or tagging added.

Re: Blogrush – 7 Critical Mistakes

Ken Y-N — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 18:56:29 -0000

Re: Blogrush – 7 Critical Mistakes

Ken Y-N — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 09:51:05 -0000

Here's an interesting thought - widget positioning is one of these prisoner's dilemma options. If I hide it at the bottom of the page, then I'll "lose" less viewers, but if I do it then everyone else does that too, and it becomes pretty useless. If instead I promote it prominently, I am doing so hoping that everyone else will play along and put their's high-up too.

(BTW, I haven't a clue who John Reese is...)

Re: Blogrush – 7 Critical Mistakes

Ken Y-N — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 09:51:05 -0000

Re: Linking Abuse Or Linking Awareness

Ken Y-N — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 21:48:06 -0000

Interesting article Andy, although it does make you sound like a bit of an MFA spammer, I felt. They should have chucked in a link to you, though.

Funnily enough, just yesterday in another piece in the Gruaniad:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/sep/2...

There are no links to their sources and seventh paragraph could very well have been collated from a few searches of my blog...

The question I really have, though, is how do you become sufficient of an authority (for whatever definition we take of that) and get the press to ask you for interviews? I'd love to be asked, but barring Al Jazeera asking me to do a video blog on Japan, I've heard nothing. Actually, perhaps that is one answer to my question; if I'd taken that offer I could have got more?

Re: Linking Abuse Or Linking Awareness

Ken Y-N — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 21:48:06 -0000

Re: Real or Fake PageRank Update In Progress (round 3)

Ken Y-N — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 00:51:58 -0000

Well, I survived with my PR5 intact despite my TextLinkAds!

However, looking around my pals in the Japan niche, about half of them with TLAs got clobbered a couple of points, with one getting knocked from 6 to 3, but the blog is also part of a big network, so excluding these mutual links PR3 or PR4 is a more accurate score, IMO.

Andy, what is your advice to people with TLAs? TLA provides me personally with my advertising and experimentation budget, and I place my TLAs above the fold, so I like to think I am giving people value for money, not PageRank for money!

Re: Real or Fake PageRank Update In Progress (round 3)

Ken Y-N — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 00:51:58 -0000

Re: ZeroRank – More PageRank Carnage (Round 5)

Ken Y-N — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 19:52:24 -0000

I just got an email from TLA to remind us all to be more stealthy with our link selling and titling our link blocks, but even though I still have an unmasked affiliate link to TLA on one page that I haven't quite got round to removing, I survived the carnage.

Oh, and I just noticed yesterday one site I regularly frequent:

http://www.japantoday.com

PageRank 7, but at the bottom of the left column, what's those three MARKETPLACE links? The right-hand ads are all nicely nofollowed, but...

Re: ZeroRank – More PageRank Carnage (Round 5)

Ken Y-N — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 19:52:24 -0000

Re: ZeroRank – More PageRank Carnage (Round 5)

Ken Y-N — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 00:11:11 -0000

Andy - just spotted a bug - I typed nofollow into my post above, but it didn't appear.

Re: ZeroRank – More PageRank Carnage (Round 5)

Ken Y-N — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 00:11:11 -0000

Andy - just spotted a bug - I typed nofollow into my post above, but it didn't appear.

Re: ZeroRank – More PageRank Carnage (Round 5)

Ken Y-N — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 22:51:37 -0000

Just to follow up, Google finally caught up with me and slapped me down to PR3 from PR5. And I'd just finished deleting all mention of TLA too, although I still have, and don't intend to drop, TLA.

Japan Today's still sitting on PR7, even though using linkdomain on Yahoo! shows a pretty suspicious pattern of links for these linked sites.

Re: ZeroRank – More PageRank Carnage (Round 5)

Ken Y-N — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 22:51:37 -0000

Re: ZeroRank – More PageRank Carnage (Round 5)

Ken Y-N — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 20:15:29 -0000

Just in case you're still following this, Japan Today finally got slapped down to PR4.

Re: ZeroRank – More PageRank Carnage (Round 5)

Ken Y-N — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 20:15:29 -0000

Just in case you're still following this, Japan Today finally got slapped down to PR4.

Re: Fast Company Beta Tips

Ken Y-N — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 00:46:42 -0000

Andy, I'd love an invite, although I suspect it will be yet another site where I create a profile then never do anything further with it...

Re: Fast Company Beta Tips

Ken Y-N — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 00:46:42 -0000

Andy, I'd love an invite, although I suspect it will be yet another site where I create a profile then never do anything further with it...

Re: Dragonball Evolution Review: This Movie Sucks Dragon-What?

Ken Y-N — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 09:55:33 -0000

I have no idea who Piccolo is, but he reminded me of someone else:

In A.D. 2009
Movie was beginning.
Captain: What happen?
Mechanic: Somebody set up us the bomb.
Operator: We get signal.
Captain: What !
Operator: Main screen turn on.
Captain: It's you !!
Piccolo: How are you gentlemen !!
Piccolo: All your ball are belong to us.
Piccolo: You are on the way to destruction.

..and I'm sure you all know the rest...

Re: ReviewMe Is Behind On Blog Statistics

Ken Y-N — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 18:31:58 -0000

Funnily enough, I ended up here after spotting your blog as one of the featured ones on ReviewMe then checking your RSS feed.

Interesting about your two ratings - I just signed up with the service last night, and I am on $100 per review with Alexa around 300,000 or more, Technorati (when it works) of 25,000, and just over 400 RSS readers (higher than average given my traffic?) according to FeedBurner.

Whether or not anyone will pay that is a different matter altogether...

Re: ReviewMe Is Behind On Blog Statistics

Ken Y-N — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 18:31:58 -0000

Re: Osmosis: The easiest way to learn Japanese

Ken Y-N — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 23:27:29 -0000

I'm a great believer in Japanese by osmosis and Japanese beer by mouth.

Re: Stalking Bandwagon

Ken Y-N — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 19:56:44 -0000

About the rule-bending nature of foreigners - lots of people have these kind of experiences (outside of a sexual paradigm, I mean, though what you said is true to some degree). I find that strangers tell me really wildly personal stuff or feel like they can complain to me about something or otherwise confide in me because I am foreign.

I don't know if my aura needs polishing or something, but in the good number of years I've been here I've never experienced anything like that!

Re: Textbook Tripe

Ken Y-N — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 00:32:16 -0000

Interesting post... Do they do Scotland, or is there just "England"? If it were Scotland I'd choose:

* Booze
* Scottish National Football team and supporters
* Jacobites
* More booze

Look on the bright side Deas, at least they didn't choose "Guns" as one of them!

Re: Textbook Tripe

Ken Y-N — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 01:54:17 -0000

Carlie - perhaps number four should be shrimps and barbies?

Deas, I'd love to hear how they sum up Ireland and - is it IGIRISU or Eikoku?

Re: Water Type Quiz

Ken Y-N — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 22:33:52 -0000

Have you mistyped 思春期 there, which is adolesence?

Dolphin hair band - didn't know that dolphins had hair, myself.

Re: Japan’s Take on Human Rights

Ken Y-N — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 23:38:14 -0000

Thanks for the linkage, Deas!

Q4 indicates that 85% of people tend not to agree with human rights whingers, which hopefully means that we won't see the situation in many parts of the world where you dare not say too many negative things about a person in case you get accused of being racist/sexist/fattist/whateverist.

Of course, I'm sure someone will take Q4 and twist it to mean agreeing with Aso's statement a couple of months ago about rights being like butter.

Re: Broken English Teachers

Ken Y-N — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 21:41:17 -0000

Number 3 should be "sets"!

And should 5 start with "To whom", but I always get my whos and whoms confused!

Re: Broken English Teachers

Ken Y-N — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 19:29:39 -0000

Deas, good point about the past tense - I didn't think of that and without context either past or present is OK.

Alex, about the and thee, many Japanese get taught that thee is used when the noun starts with a vowel. I should find a survey on that, but casually chatting with cow-orkers I find most of them were taught that way, and believe it to be a rule that native speakers follow. I remember that Tony Laslow talked about it in one of the ダーリンは外国人 books - ダーリンの頭ん中に, IIRC.

Re: Catchin’ Up

Ken Y-N — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 02:27:44 -0000

If you're going to USJ, I can recommend the Universal Port hotel. We paid 7,600 yen per person including breakfast on a weekday last week, available through their official web site. Actually, buying a tickets plus train plus hotel package is usually good value. The hotel also sells tickets at x% off for guests, although when I went last week we had free tickets (including guided tour!) we'd won in a competition.

The new coaster is - well, I hate coasters generally, so I cannot comment. Wifey loves coasters but she said when she went before the back row is rather scary. Shrek 4D is an excellent laugh (I wanted to go round again!) and Spiderman is a nice wee ride.

Re: Year 1

Ken Y-N — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 02:27:28 -0000

Interesting numbers indeed! I'd love to know where your traffic comes from - searches, links, or bookmarks. I manage about 35,000 uniques but have over 1,000 subscribers and an Authority of 340 or so on Technorati. I can't help thinking I should have many, many more search visitors than I actually do.

Have you ever thought of sticking ads on your blog?

PS: Please fix your template to remember our names!

PPS: Your site's really difficult to read if I don't load graphics, and if I do load graphics, Opera slows down badly

PPPS: I'll be dropping you a line later this week with an offer to increase your traffic in exchange for 15 minutes of work 8)

Re: Year 1

Ken Y-N — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 22:08:16 -0000

Woohoo, the new template already knows my name even though the old one could never remember it!

PS: re my PPPS - check your mailbox tonight for something interesting, assuming I can get an FTP client to work on my site...

Re: Diagnosis

Ken Y-N — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 01:05:24 -0000

Five pills is par for the course for a cold here! And they usually don't work anyway; you're probably just as well taking a Lemsip (or whatever the blend of lemon and aspirin is called here) as wasting time at the quack's!

Oh, and we just call the program Black Hospital; much easier to remember. It's one of my favourite shows, actually. The "how many years left" show is relatively entertaining, but shallow on medical information, although in the Spring they wired Jinnai up to a one day ECG and caught him watching a dirty movie (or more!!!) when Norika was away, as there was an unexpected high heartbeat spike for 10 minutes in the evening.

Re: Crap Words

Ken Y-N — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 23:54:32 -0000

全然マジやべぇ～なブログ！！！ No, I don't know what that means either...

But, 全然 with a positive is perfectly acceptable and appears as such in real paper dictionaries.

French is a verb, to cut into thin strips, and I wonder (can't be bothered looking it up!) if it came from an inability to spell the French for french, julienne or something, with an accent somewhere.

Talking about food from places but to go off on a tangent, I'm glad to see in Japan that Brussell sprouts, or 芽キャベツ as they are called here, are becoming fashionable these days.

Ken Y-N's last blog post: Yahoo! used daily by over two in three Japanese

Re: Syrup Sadness

Ken Y-N — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 21:28:15 -0000

Deas, Google tells me:

http://www.google.com/search?q=tablespoons+in+a...

There are 256 tablespoons per gallon, making it 2.3 cents per tbsp.

This is actually a case where international shops might work out cheaper. Things like this come in pretty small bottles (another thing is cake ingredients) so if you go to an import shop you could find a bigger size that is cheaper per unit.

Re: Pondering a Netbook

Ken Y-N — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 06:17:59 -0000

The Eee PC is a bit slow as Netbooks go, so I hear, but as long as you're not planning playing the latest and greatest games or running Vista you'll be OK, I think.

What is a good deal, however, is e-Mobile offering it for 100 yen along with a two-year contract for a 3G data card, which would also solve your problem about being not allowed on the school network, and if you've got a good signal at home, you could even ditch your home net connection!

I can't find a link, but it used to be at Yodobashi Camera. However, they are offering USB modems for 1 yen and other nice deals right now...

Ken Y-Ns last blog post was: Murdering curry in Japan

Re: Jams.tv Steals

Ken Y-N — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 02:23:25 -0000

Deas, just to let you know, and just in case you missed my post on JCB, I've finally got my last remaining DNS problem fixed (touch wood...) so everything should be trouble-free from here on out.

<abbr>Ken Y-Ns last blog post was: Fish-eating (and vegetarian statistics) in Japan</abbr>

Re: Social Weather Forecasts

Ken Y-N — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 01:13:03 -0000

My city gets 6 sunny, 6 rain, and one snow... Mind you, my city does stretch into the mountains quite a bit, so one of the voters might be living in a village at the top of a hill...

Another thing, the ピンポイント天気 combo box is sorted in the wrong order for Kansai. It's Osaka, Hyogo, Kyoto, Shiga, Nara, Wakayama, but the usual order is Shiga, Kyoto, Osaka, Hyogo, Nara and Wakayama.

(PS: the "Goto comments" at the head doesn't work for me)

Re: Facebook Translation

Ken Y-N — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 09:37:18 -0000

As a non-native, 今なにを looks strange to me. Perhaps I am expecting to see 今なら? Would 今何を or even 今ナニを look better I wonder? And is しているか better than していますか, as it is コメントする.

Re: Japan Facts via Wolfram|Alpha

Ken Y-N — Tue, 19 May 2009 10:57:18 -0000

Japanese could watch the Seven Samurai over 10,000 times after their US counterparts die:

http://www42.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28Japan...

There's also this:

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/wolfram-al...

I was trying to think how to formulate something like the number of times one could climb Mount Fuji instead of watching the Seven Samurai...

Re: Japan Facts via Wolfram|Alpha

Ken Y-N — Tue, 19 May 2009 19:29:41 -0000

It was:

(japan life expectancy - USA) / runtime of Seven Samurai

Re: Horse Meat

Ken Y-N — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 10:41:36 -0000

I saw recently that something like 80% of the Kyushu horse meat is imported live from Canada then fattened up here, 17% is from Kyushu (or Canada-born horses that spend more than half their lives there), and just 3% is the real deal Kumamoto basashi.

Note that there's a lot of fake labelling as well...

Re: Campaign to Reduce Wikipedia’s PageRank to Zero

Ken Y-N — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 20:02:57 -0000

If you're using WordPress, may I suggest my plugin for those of you wanting to turn off your linkjuice for Wikipedia?

http://whatjapanthinks.com/wikipedia-nofollow/