By Mizuko Ito, an inside look at the social effects of thumb-typing and sha-mail. She happens to be be Joi Ito's sister. While you're over there look around the Japan Media Review site, which looks like it will become an indispensible English language research source as East Asian net culture runs off in its own direction. Three cheers for USC and GLOCOM for putting this together.

Found via Joi, naturally, who also adds:

I recently talked to one of the vendors involved in i-mode and they told me that Japanese girls have around $300 dollars of disposable income a month. $100 goes to food, $100 goes to clothes and $100 goes to their cell phone. The target average revenue per user (ARPU) for i-mode is around 7000 yen ($50).

11:17:31 AM    

Check out Kevin Marks' parody of the Raging Cow blog marketing campaign. The guy's been doing multimedia since the days of BBC Interactive and it shows. Understated and deadly.

Here, googlebot. Here, googlebot, nice googlebot....
11:04:10 AM