Last week in Fukuoka, I stumbled upon Kaisei Hamamoto, the creator of Blogopolis.jp. He had some great visualization on the screen and out of curiosity, I asked him “what’s that?!”
He then zoomed in and out to showoff his creation, Blogopolis.jp, which I must say looks pretty. When first logged in, Blogopolis shows you the various topics that are being discussed/shared within the Japanese tech community. And when you click on a topic, some charts appear to shows you the number of subscribers and bookmarks made.
While Stumbleupon, Reddit, and Digg are some of our favorite bookmarking sites, in Japan, Hatena is the clear choice.
As you zoom in into the world of Blogopolis, you will notice that each article/blog is represented by blocks of various sizes. Hamamoto explained that the area of each block represents the number of bookmarks and height represents subscribers. The larger or higher it is, the more bookmarks or subscribers that article has.
Although Blogopolis does look pretty, using it as a daily curated reader would be a tough habit to adopt… Unless you have time to zoom in and out everyday looking for articles. For curated reading, social bookmarking sites or Twitter list are still the best for now.
Of course, Blogopolis is just Hamamoto’s side gig. He told me that he has been in the content curation business for many years.
Crowsnest is his latest startup; it’s basically a Twitter news aggregator built specifically for the Japanese. Hamamoto believes that social media will play a crucial role in shaping online users reading habits and thus started Crowsnest to help curate and list content from Twitter.
One thing unqiue is that Crowsnest attaches all related tweets to a news article which helps users understand more about what other people are saying.
Or to put it simply, it’s like weibo with threaded comments (a feature Twitter says it left out “by design”…)
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