Japan’s sumo season has come to an end, but the power users over at JapanSoc are just getting started.
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.
Since coming to Japan, the amount of time I spend in front of the television has plummeted. I think it’s fair to say that I watch less than two hours of TV a week now. Some of you will find that hard to imagine, but it’s not surprising when everything on TV is in a foreign language.
The internet as an alternative to TV
These days I get my entertainment fix from the internet, and keep informed about the world via the web, too, but there’s a big difference between TV and the internet. For starters, you can choose what to read, and what to believe. Television doesn’t give you that choice, imposing its own version of the news on you.
That means the internet gives you a more well-rounded view of the world, drawn from multiple sources. Also, actively reading a news article on the web gives you a better understanding of the topic than passively digesting information from TV. Of course, you also have the power to research the topic further on the net.
Does TV have a negative effect on IQ?
I managed to track down two charts, one listing countries by TV viewing times, and the other by estimated IQ, and while there’s no perfect correlation to show TV makes you stupid, the results are still interesting.
The U.S leads the way, with TV addiction consuming over 8 hours a day of the average American’s life. Turkey comes next with 5 hours, and those wacky game shows encourage the Japanese to watch close to 4 hours of TV a day.
As for IQ…
South Koreans, who watch just a little over 3 hours of TV a day, are second only to the geniuses of Hong Kong. Japan, a country whose citizens watch half as much TV as Americans, are ranked as the third most intelligent nation. Our friends, the drooling couch potatoes from the U.S., rank a lowly 23rd.
This argument holds no water!
I’m plucking at straws here trying to make a case that television fries your brain, and my argument falls apart when you consider Ireland. The Irish watch just two and a half hours of TV a day, but are only the 36th most intelligent country in the world! All I can assume is that the free time gained from watching less TV is obviously wasted at the pub, rather than swatting up on world issues on the internet.
I am stunned that the average American watches over 8 hours of TV a day. No wonder they are so fat! It makes me wonder how many hours of commercials they are exposed to everyday…. wow…
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Last autumn there was a good drama on TV called Abarenbo Mama. One of the key storylines was how the young stepmother, Ayu, would get along with the other mothers at her son’s kindergarten. Although it was a comedy, “mama groups” really do exist in Japan, and mothers go out of the way to fit into these groups.
That means they have to share the same interests, opinions, fashion sense, attitude to their husbands, goals for their children, and anything else required to keep the status quo.
Got a small child? Get a big car!
Over the last few years, one of the more eye-catching similarities between mothers of young children is their need for a big car. They are supposed to be family sized, but I’m sure you could get half a sumo stable in these so-called “mini” vans.
It’s not the best photo, but you can see how the mothers at my local kindergarten all have 5-door hatchbacks off a grayscale palette.
I really don’t understand why small children need such large cars? These days it’s rare for a family to have more than two children, but even our little pink ‘n’ gay Lapin is big enough for two adults, two children and a push chair.
Maybe it’s a case of keepin’ up with Joneses, but it could also have something to do with the culture of husbands giving their monthly paychecks to their wives, and getting some pocket money in return. Perhaps these mamas have bought themselves big “mini” vans, while they let their husbands drive around in one of these:
In the first part of this tutorial, I went through the steps you need to add friends and send messages in JapanSoc. In this part, I’m going to explain how you can track your friends’ activity.
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:
- Personal Info - your main page with your intro and user stats.
- Submitted - all the posts you’ve submitted to JapanSoc.
- Top Stories - posts you submitted that made the front page.
- Upcoming - all your other posts.
- Commented - these are the posts you have commented on.
- Soc’d - these are the posts you have voted for.
- 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.
. Just seen two of them. Will find the rest two.