Note: I’m writing this at nearly 5am. It’s been a long night of upgrading the site and I know there are some loose ends. The FAQ and blog will be updated in due course, and any bugs you find (there are always some) will be eventually squashed. Oh, and I deleted all your profile bios by accident, sorry about that!

For occasions such as this JapanSoc overhaul, Deas from Rocking in Hakata has created this fantastic video logo for our favorite social bookmarking site. Watch, gasp, then download the high definition version for your own JapanSoc-related videos.

Incidentally, Deas made a very cool JapanSoc OS X widget and some great social bookmarking icons, too. Thanks, Deas!

Who’s behind the new JapanSoc.com?

Before I give you a run-down of the new features, let me give a big, big thank you to Chris Gaunt of Nihongo Notes and J-Pop Japan. Chris just happens to be a multi-talented web developer, who completely rewrote the JapanSoc template. That’s no easy task when you consider a typical Social Web CMS template weighs in at over 60 files. I can’t thank Chris enough for the work he’s put into the site over the last month, and I’ll be using his services again in the near future. Chris does a lot of freelance work, particularly for Wordpress and Ruby on Rails sites. He’s also a PHP wizard and can dazzle with CSS. Learn more about what Chris can do for your site on his LinkedIn profile.

The engine that powers JapanSoc is Social Web CMS, an open source project which I’ve become heavily involved this last year, developing over 20 modules and contributing to the SWCMS SVN. Together with Chris, we are quite a formidable team!

16 All New Features!

1. The Design

This is what JapanSoc.com now looks like:

2. The JapanSoc Community News bar

Click the bar at the top and it will drop down, showing you links to JapanSoc.org related sites and RSS feeds from the Community Blog and the Twitter #jsoc hashtag.

3. Drop down categories and new ones, too!

I’ve split the categories into a few very generic groups, and using the drop-down “Suckerfish” menu makes it easy for us to add more categories, not to mention them being much more accessible than before.

4. Easy Submit button

When you click on the new submit button, a little drop-down box opens where you can directly add the url you want to submit.

5. Enhanced sidebar comments

Not only is there a little avatar next to each comment, when you hover the mouse over the comments in the sidebar, a tooltip shows you the name of the commentator and the title of the post the comment was made on. Very handy!

6. Avatars have gone Gravatar

I ran a poll recently to find out whether you preferred to use Gravatar or upload your own avatar. The response was clearly in favor of Gravatar, so we’ve dropped the uploading feature altogether. That’s a good thing because it saves you from faffing around with avatars, it saves me from fixing bad uploads, and it gives the site more flexibility in how avatars are used.

7. Nice4Rice or an umeboshi?

I used to have a website called “Nice4Rice” which I customized to allow readers to get a free backlink by “giving rice” to my reviews. It was a lot of fun and I miss that site a bit. Fortunately, I kept hold of the original Nice4Rice rice bowls and have used them in comment ratings!

If you like a comment or agree with it, give the author some rice! If it left a bad taste in your mouth, an umeboshi would be more appropriate. Of course, this is just cosmetic and three umeboshi will still bury a comment.

8. Filter comments to your friends

You’ll see in that image above a small link that reads “Show friends’ comments only”. If you click that, all comments from people not on your friends list will temporarily be hidden. You can view them individually by clicking the show/hide link, or just click the “Show all comments” link to view them all again.

9. Filter stories to your friends

Why limit it to comments? On the top menu bar, logged in users will see a new page called “Friends”. Clicking that will filter all the latest stories to show only those from your friends.

10. HTML in comments

BBCode has been an option for a while now on JapanSoc, but very few people used it. I’m not really surprised because we’re all so used to Wordpress comments. With that in mind, we dropped BBCode (which has left a bit of mess) and now allow limited HTML tags in comments, just like Wordpress. Smilies can still be used, and I’ve added a link to Ken’s Evoticon site which opens in a new tab so you can copy and paste so zany Japanese emoticons, too!

11. Subscribe to comments

This is one of my favorite new features. Instead of just allowing the story submitter to subscribe to replies, now anyone who comments has the choice of getting reply notifications sent to their email box.

12. The Social Bar

This is the big one! Far and away the most significant addition to JapanSoc is the social bar. When you log in, you’ll see the social bar glued to the foot of your window, showing your own user stats and links to your inbox, profile and settings.

13. Send a Quick Message

In the Social Bar is a Quick Message icon which gives you an instant messaging form so you can send out to your friends. Whenever you send a message, your friend will be notified by email (unless they turn off email notification), and if you get a message, the inbox icon will light up to indicate you have mail. How very convenient!

14. View other users in the Social Bar

The best thing about the Social Bar is that when you click on somebody’s username or avatar, anywhere on the site, their user info will be loaded into your Social Bar with a spot of Ajax so you don’t even leave the page.

Clicking the avatar or name here will take you to their main profile, but you can also use this bar to add or remove the user from your friends list, send them a message, visit their homepage, their Twitter page, look at their JapanSoc favorites, see if they are currently online, or return to your own Social Bar stats.

15. New-look Profiles

We’ve decided to drop the MySpace style profile and keep things simpler, but more focused on getting you connected with the viewer.

As you can see, your own sites and social network profiles get loads of attention, as do your friends and fans who will appear in your Social Bar with just one click! These are the icons Deas came up with, and there are others for Lang-8, LinkedIn and iKnow! too.

16. Oyakata

The Top Users box in the sidebar has been fun to watch over the last year, but what happens when everyone’s a Yokozuna? JapanSoc Sumo no longer ends at Yokozuna. When you get 15,000 points, you’ll be moved to the Oyakata box, a sumo stable of fame! Hat tip to Jordan for the suggestion.

Wrap-up

That’s about all of the major changes, though there are many smaller ones, too! Remember, you have to be logged in to enjoy most of the new features, so if you haven’t registered yet, please do! Visit JapanSoc.com.

The first entry into the contest is this video by Mike from Japan Is Doomed. Here’s Tony D. Puddlespuddle, Internet Expert…

Mike is urging everyone in the world to go to YouTube, rate this video 5 stars and subscribe to his channel. C’mon, do it for Tony!

I’ve been working behind the scenes with other members of JapanSoc to revive the old Japan Blog Matsuri. This is a monthly blog “carnival” where given a theme to write about, bloggers everywhere are invited to share their stories with everyone else. It’s a great opportunity to find new blogs and attract new readers to your own.

Organization and Announcements

The Japan Blog Matsuri Newsroom is where things are being organized, and I can now tell you that the first matsuri of the revival will be hosted in August at The Tokyo Traveler.

Shane has published a Japan Blog Matsuri announcement naming the theme and submission details, so if you’re interested, swing by her blog to learn more!

At universities across the UK, student clubs and societies are known as “socs”. Each of these socs is intended to bring together people with common interests, and nearly every campus has a Japan Soc.

With its Japan-related news and stories, the website of the same name has done a good job of focusing on the “Japan”. Now, though, I’d like to give as much attention to the “Soc”, by sharing with and learning more about the JapanSoc members themselves!

What is the JapanSoc Community Blog?

The JCB is an open blog that allows anybody to post a blurb about anything. It’s a blog, forum and Twitter hybrid, that can be used for Sharing, Promoting, Asking Questions, Updating and Organizing, or as I prefer to call it, SPAQUO!

Examples of SPAQUO

Share

“Do you have any good photos from New Year? I’m writing a post about New Year in Japan, and would like to include other people’s experiences. Oh, and if you want any old Japanese textbooks, I’m giving mine away.”

Promote

“Just a normal day today, but I found time to post a video of my toaster oven on YouTube. It makes great cheese on toast! Tell your friends. The Japanese toaster oven phenomenon will take over the world!”

Ask a Question

“I’m thinking of getting that seishun 18 kippu summer train discount thingy, has anyone used it before? Is it worth it?”

Update

“I’ve just got back from three days in Osaka and Kyoto. I’ll have the pictures up on my blog tomorrow. It’s goooood to be back!”

Organize

“I’ll be at the Aldgate in Shibuya on Sunday evening. Join me for a drink! If you’re not in Tokyo, I’ll buy you a virtual beer at the Japan Resort in Second Life tonight after 11pm.”

You can see in the examples above that you don’t have to say anything funny, intelligent or useful. It’s not a competition. No points, no genki karma, just good old community spirit.

The possibilities with JCB are earth moving!

The JapanSoc Community Blog enables tagging, which is incredibly useful for tracking a topic. For example, imagine a group of you are organizing a get-together next month. If you all use the same tag, e.g. “meetup”, you can track the latest developments by searching for “meetup”, or even subscribing to the RSS feed for the topic “meetup”.

Technical bits and pieces

Registration for JCB is separate from the main JapanSoc site, so you’ll need to register again. Of course, it’s a good idea to sign up with the same username and password you use on the main site so that you don’t confuse your JapanSoc login info.

After you’ve registered, you’ll see a form at the top of the main blog page where you can type your SPAQUO in. This saves the trouble of going into the Wordpress Dashboard and writing a full post.

Avatars on the blog are also different to the avatars on JapanSoc. JCB uses Gravatar, a global avatar which is quickly becoming the standard across the blogosphere. If you have a gravatar, you’ll need to register with the same email address you used when you got your gravatar, otherwise it won’t show up.

RSS feeds are abundant on JCB. The main feed shows the user updates, but you can also subscribe to individual author feeds and topic/tag feeds. If you’d like to show off your JapanSoc updates on your own blog, just import your author feed.

HTML is allowed in the post form, and since all users have Author status, you can always correct any mistakes afterward.

Sensible Usage

Each “update” on JCB is technically a blog post. The only difference is that you don’t have to go into the Admin panel to write it. Bearing in mind that these are blog posts, please refrain from tiny updates such as “I’m bored”.

Also, please avoid the temptation to make too many updates. One or two a day at the most is more than sufficient. Of course, you can use the comments section as much as you like.

An experiment in group twittering

This kind of group blogging is quite revolutionary, and is made possible with the new Wordpress Prologue theme. It will be interesting to see if JapanSoc’ers take to it and find it useful. What are you waiting for? Go to the JapanSoc Community Blog, sign up and post a SPAQUO!

As JapanSoc continues to grow, the average number of socs per article has risen to 4.6. So, the question is, should 4 socs be needed to hit the front page?

The case for a 4 soc promotion requirement

• Four votes would make sure higher quality articles make the front page.
• With fewer articles getting promoted, existing front page articles can get more exposure.
• Currently, almost everything gets on the front page, which defeats the purpose of “Top” stories.

The case against a 4 soc promotion requirement

• Breaking news stories might not be so new by the time they hit the front page.
• Submissions might disappear down the Upcoming page before enough people see them.
• Special interest topics might not get the exposure they deserve, e.g. ESL or anime.
• Users might be discouraged from submitting articles if it is harder to make the front page.

I should point out that a submission must get enough socs within 7 days to be promoted to the font page.

Time to vote… Update: Voting has now closed. 4 socs it is!

[poll id="8"]

Have you got Genki?

If you don’t know, “genki” is the Japanese word for “active energetic happiness” or other less exciting definitions. As such, it’s the perfect replacement for JapanSoc’s Karma, a measure of a user’s activity over the last 7 days.

Although I should be asking “Are you genki?”, I find it much more amusing to use it as a noun…

• Do you have Genki?
• What’s your Genki?
• I gotta get me some Genki!

But how much Genki can you have? The formula for Genki considers stories submitted to JapanSoc, votes and also comments. Previously, Karma didn’t use comments in its calculation, but now, with a dose of Genki, it does! The most Genki you can have is 100%, and you can check your current Genki on your profile page.

Note: Points, Sumo Rank and Genki are updated every 6 hours, not instantly.

Sidebar overhaul

You may have noticed I’ve revamped the JapanSoc sidebar. It was getting too busy for my liking, and I really wanted to keep it clean. This image shows how each sidebar box now has tabs to switch between its contents:

I hope you’ll agree that this layout is better. Incidentally, registered users and casual surfers see a different variation of the sidebar. If you haven’t registered, emphasis is given to “Monthly Picks”, whereas registered users see the “Upcoming” box more often.

Suggestions for future improvements

Without a professional developer to help, there are limitations on the kind of features I can implement into JapanSoc. That won’t stop me trying though, and my amateurish efforts behind the scenes are the reason for the “beta” label next to the JapanSoc title. My apologies if you’ve tried using the site during those frantic moments when I’m doing some live testing!

There are two things currently on the drawing board; 1) to allow you to add more than one “homepage” to your profile. Some of you write for more than one website and I think it would be nice if you could add those links to your profile (Update: Done!), and 2) follow up Deas’ suggestion for a “Who’s Online?” feature. I think it’s a great idea and certainly worth pursuing.

If you have any other ideas for improving JapanSoc, please leave a comment. In the meantime, I have to live up to my Makkuchi sumo rank and find some interesting articles to submit. Maybe I can boost my Genki!

What is JapanSoc Sumo?

It’s a new measure for ranking users so we can see who the biggest contributors to JapanSoc are. You earn points by submitting stories, voting, commenting, saving stories as “Favorites”, and for getting positive votes on comments you write. The more points you get, the higher up the sumo rankings you’ll move, until everybody recognizes you as an almighty Yokozuna!

What happened to Karma?

Karma is still there, but is now merely an indication of a user’s recent activity. If I can ever figure out the magical Karma formula, I’ll try to include more factors than just submitting stories and voting into the equations.

How do you get sumo points again?

Here’s the breakdown:

• 10 points – Submitting a story that hits the front page
• 7 points – Submitting a story that doesn’t make the font page
• 5 points – Commenting on a story
• 3 points – Voting for a story
• 2 points – Adding a story to your Favorites
• 1 point – Receiving a positive vote on a comment

How many points do you need to move up the rankings?

Everyone starts at Jonokuchi, the lowest level sumo rank…

• <1,000 points – Jonokuchi
• 1,000 – 1,999 points – Jonidan
• 2,000 – 2,999 points – Sandamme
• 3,000 – 3,999 points – Makushita
• 4,000 – 4,999 points – Juryo
• 5,000 – 5,999 points – Makkuchi
• 6,000 – 6,999 points – Komusubi
• 7,000 – 7,999 points – Sekiwake
• 8,000 – 9,999 points – Ozeki
• >10,000 points – Yokozuna

10,000 points! You’ve got to be kidding me!

I’m hopeful that JapanSoc will continue to grow and and establish itself as one of the biggest Japan-related social sites of its kind. So, five or ten years down the line, any Ozeki or Yokozuna will be like JapanSoc gods to all the new users that join. And if you’re a blogger, you can be sure they’ll start reading your blog!

The current top ten power users are…

Juryo:

• LongCountdown (me, Nick) from here and Virtual Tripping

Jonidan:

• ShaneS from A Typical Life and The Tokyo Traveler
• Deas from Rocking in Hakata
• fz22gq also known as Neil Duckett
• OmoshiroiEigo also known as Michael McKinlay and Omoshiroi Eigo

Jonokuchi:

• Thomas from Nihon Hacks and Babelhut
• Hawaiibadboy from Chris’ English School
• thechemist from the Daily J (whatever happened to Tori?)
• billywest from 7:10 to Tokyo and Billy West Evolution
• freedomwv from The Liberty Factor

… and snapping at their heels are a bunch of regular contributors who I’m sure will break into the top 10 very soon! See the full Top Users List for more.

Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Addition: Points are updated every 6 hours, not instantly.

Step 1: Understanding the profile page

From your friends list in your profile page, you can access any of your friends’ own profile pages. Since I’m so active on JapanSoc, I’ve used my own profile for this tutorial.

The profile page has seven tabs, as follows:

1. Personal Info – your main page with your intro and user stats.
2. Submitted – all the posts you’ve submitted to JapanSoc.
3. Top Stories – posts you submitted that made the front page.
4. Upcoming – all your other posts.
5. Commented - these are the posts you have commented on.
6. Soc’d - these are the posts you have voted for.
7. Favorites – posts you have saved/favorited/bookmarked.

Step 2: Subscribing to a friend’s submissions

With the exception of the Personal Info page, all these pages have a unique RSS feed icon in the top left corner, as shown:

That means you can subscribe to a friend’s activity, which comes in very handy if you’ve cheekily teamed up with someone to soc each other’s posts! If this is the case, I would recommend subscribing only to your friend’s “submitted” RSS feed, as that includes all your friend’s posts.

You could also subscribe to the “Favorites” feed, explained in step 4.

Step 3: Subscribing to multiple RSS feeds

If you’re a hardcore JapanSoc’er and have more than one friend (which I hope you do!), you might consider using a free service such as RSS Mix to combine all your friends “submitted” feeds together into one single RSS feed.

Step 4: Understanding “Favorites”

On social bookmarking sites like Digg and StumbleUpon, your “favorites” would be considered the posts you have dugg or stumbled. JapanSoc, on the other hand, has both “Soc’d” and “Favorites” pages. So what’s the difference?

Soc’d posts are the ones you’ve considered good enough to vote for. I tend to soc an awful lot of posts (582 as I write this!), but that doesn’t mean that I think they are all brilliant articles which are worth printing, framing and hanging on the wall.

Favorites, in the JapanSoc sense, are the best of the best, the ones you actual want to save so you can find them again in the future. These are the posts you want to tell all your friends about.

Step 5: Adding Favorites

Below the post you want to add to your Favorites is a link, “Add to Favorites”.

When you click that link, you’ll be notified of success and given the option of going directly to your Favorites.

Posts that you have “favorited”, can be removed by clicking the “Remove” link. (Don’t worry Billy, I didn’t click it!).

You’ll also notice that there is an RSS icon on the Favorites page, too, so you can subscribe to your friends’ favorite posts.

A New Addition to JapanSoc

At the bottom of the JapanSoc sidebar, I’ve added a new box showing posts that users have recently added to their favorites. It’s worth keeping an eye on this box as you might find some great articles you had previously missed.

Of course, it also provides another opportunity for some self-promotion. If you add your own stories to your Favorites, they are going to appear in this box for all to see.

Summary

Now you know how to create a list of favorite posts in JapanSoc, and share your recommendations with friends using the RSS feeds in your profile pages.

I think we should consider uniting together to promote our sites in other social news sites. I thought about recommending everyone’s stories in sites like StumbleUpon or Digg, to get better exposure to new visitors.

I thought that was a great idea, and so did a few other JapanSoc users. The bloggers amongst us all chipped in with Digg and StumbleUpon user names, and now we’re in a better position to rally support for our favorite blog posts.

Socializing on JapanSoc

The big social bookmarking sites mentioned above offer tremendous functionality for building small communities of like-minded people, and while JapanSoc is rather limited in that respect, it’s not without its own fancy features.

This tutorial is split into two parts. This first part covers JapanSoc’s Messaging functionality, and part two will explain how you can “favorite” stories and track your friends behavior on the site.

Adding Friends

Before I get into messaging in JapanSoc, you need to know how add friends to your friends list. Let’s do that first:

Step 1: Go to your friend’s profile page

Click your friend’s username under his or her submissions, comments, or anywhere they have been active.

Step 2: Add your friend

On the profile page you’ll see a link to add that person to your friends list.

Step 3: View your friends list

Once you’ve added your friend, you should see the green “successfully added friend” message. After that you can click the “View my friends” link, which is also accessible from your own profile page.

Step 4: Find your new friend in your friends list

That will take you to your own profile page and display your list of friends. In this example, you’ll see “billywest” (from 7:10 to Tokyo) is now in my list, and I’m going to click the “message” icon next to his name to send him a message.

Step 5: Compose a message

A box opens up and you can send your first message. Bear in mind that this isn’t email. Your friend won’t receive the message in his email box. Instead…

Step 6: Receiving a message

…when your friend next logs into JapanSoc, he’ll see an alert notifying him of his message.

Step 7: Viewing the message

Clicking the “View now” link in the previous step opens up the message which you can then reply to, delete, or just close. Alternatively, you could have gone directly to your Inbox, as shown in the next step.

Step 8: Managing your messages

Your Inbox can be accessed from your profile page.

Step 9: Your JapanSoc Inbox

In your Inbox, you can view, reply to and delete messages as you please.

Summary

So, in short:

1. Add a friend
2. View list of friends
3. Send a message
4. Manage messages in your Inbox

Now you know how to pester your friends for socs and comments. Next time I’ll explain how to track your friends actions, and harness the power of social bookmarking!

Continue: Part 2: Using favorites and subscribing to your friends’ activity

Edward Chmura put out a good word for JapanSoc on Japundit this week, helping to push the number of registered users over the 100 mark. Let me thank Ed, who is also responsible for the excellent Japan Talk podcast, and let me welcome any new JapanSoc users to my blog, the place where I post updates about the site (so please subscribe!).

Web host problems continue…

Lately I’ve been hugely frustrated with my current web host. I run a dozen websites and over the last month, I’ve seen more downtime than I have in my whole three years with the company. Even when the sites are working, they seem to be sluggish and often timeout when trying to load.

I won’t name names until I’m off my current web host, but I will say that they have been either impossible to contact or slow to respond to “trouble tickets”. Let me give you an example of how bad their service has become. This screenshot shows one of my sites had a sudden drop in traffic on Wednesday, March 5th. Usually the sites go down while the U.S. is asleep so I’m not affected too much, but this time it happened for maybe six hours during U.S. peak time:

Naturally, I sent a “trouble ticket” to my web host and had to wait over 24 hours for a response:

“The connection has timed out. The server is taking too long to respond.” I get the same error for all the listed domains. Please help. Nick.

Dear Nicholas. Thank you for the word to support. As far as I can see your site working properly and fast. Also we haven’t any records in our tech logs regarding problems with your web or mysql server. So please re-check your site once again. Should you have any further question feel free to contact us and we will be glad to assist you.

That was enough to make me sign up for another web host and start the laborious process of moving my websites across.

Upcoming JapanSoc downtime

I haven’t decided when to move JapanSoc or this blog, but it will probably happen within the next two weeks. When it does, I imagine there could be about 72 hours of downtime while I wait for the domain name servers to point to the new web host, and of course I’ll have to figure out how to import the databases and get JapanSoc running with PHP 5.

Once it’s all working, you should find JapanSoc loading faster and being online the promised 99.9% of the time. That should make the three days of downtime worth it, and I hope you all agree.

In the meantime, please continue using JapanSoc as you have been, and expect another notice before I start making the move.