And Japan's Most Quoted Blogger Is ...

The Japanese version of Technorati, a Weblog search engine, launched earlier this week.

Technorati's first foreign venture, Technorati Japan, is actually a fully owned subsidiary of Digital Garage, a Japanese Internet incubator, which has purchased the Japanese sales and marketing rights to Technorati Japan. Nevertheless, the two still have close ties: Japanese blogger Joi Ito, who acts as Technorati's general manager of global operations as well as director of Technorati Japan, is a founder and former co-CEO of Digital Garage.

Technorati claims to be the "the most comprehensive source of fresh information about the global and local conversations going on all across the Web." It achieves this by recording when each weblog or other content-syndicating site is updated and then ranking how much "influence" each has by counting the number of incoming links to individual Web posts. The site can therefore monitor which bloggers and which subject matter are receiving the most attention. Technorati says it monitors "9 million weblogs with over 40,000 new weblogs added every day, most of which are updated within seven minutes."

Though Technorati Japan has not yet announced corresponding data about the Japanese blogosphere, it is already seeing some distinct qualitative differences with the American version. In a written response to a question posed by Japan Media Review, Digital Garage Strategic Planning Manager Gen Kanai commented:

Anonymity is valued more highly in Japan than in the U.S. (for comparison's sake.) That has been the culture on the Japanese Internet in the past and it is clear that this trend will continue with Japanese weblogs. Many Japanese Internet users have pointed to a strong diary ('nikki') culture that has been a strong part of Japanese written culture for many hundreds of years. Some Japanese believe that "blogs" are an extension of Japanese diaries, which may be the cause of many personal diary-type blogs in Japan.

It's perhaps not surprising, then, that today's most "influential" Japanese blogger, according to Technorati Japan, is the 24-year-old swimsuit idol Kawori Manabe. As of late Thursday, her blog "Kawori's Chronicle" had attracted 1,934 links from 1,517 sources. By contrast, the top blogger on Technorati's analogous top 100 list in the United States was BoingBoing, which listed 23,154 links from 15,109 sources.

While still a student at the prestigious Yokohama National University, Manabe won the "Dream Girl Grand Prix" contest sponsored by the young men?s magazine "Hot Dog Press," according to the Japanese-language Wikipedia. That launched her career as an "idol" (Japanese slang for starlet or heartthrob), and she went on to gain particular fame as a swimsuit model, and later as an actress in advertisements, movies and various television programs. But she's also a proficient PC user, and before beginning her blog had written her own Web page in HTML (this, according to an interview that appeared on the National Police Agency's security portal w\Web site, of all places.)

One of Manabe's recent postings was translated on the blog ?Riding Sun,? whose author is an expatriate financial analyst who calls himself "Gaijin Biker" (gaijin means foreigner). He notes that there are no prurient photos on her site, and that it constitutes "essentially just a low-key diary of her day-to-day life." But she does link to three books she's published, two of them photo albums and the third, a sort of 'stocks for dummies'.