One of the contributing factors, I think, is that the functions and distribution of cell phone. Not only amazing number of poeple have cell phone, which I found it quite more in Japan than in the US, but also the cell phone comes with the Internet. Many people upload their blogs conveniently from their cell phone while they are waiting at bus stops, etc. Maybe this could be one of the reasons why the numbers of blogs in Japan is so high.

I think Ronald Brak got it right that the amount of time people spend thumbing their phones here is a huge factor. The major blog services here all make moblogging really easy, so people just dash off quick blogposts from wherever they happen to be. I went on a motorcycle trip last weekend and blogged it when I got home, but the Japanese friend I rode with liveblogged it from the road every time we stopped.

“International English”, as the British Council calls it, is pure, organic, agricultural-grade bull excrement, and the web is proof of its inherent idiocy.

There was an ad that used to run on BBC World about how more people in China are studying English than there are people in the UK. And there are probably more people in the UK studying French than there are people in Luxembourg. So what? The truth is that the wealthier China gets, the less people there will speak English. This is what happened in Japan. For that matter, it’s what happened in America, where in the first half of the 19th century foreign language knowledge was essential for the well-educated, and as late as WWII was still considered an essential skill for every person with a university degree. Large, wealthy countries are crap with second languages and a China with, perhaps 20 years from now, a GDP per capita near that of the poorer countries of Western Europe, will be a nation to rival America in its linguistic autism. The ‘Net is already reflecting this.