Busy blogger an Internet star in Japan

By Yuri Kageyama
Associated Press

Joichi Ito, who is fluent in English and Japanese, joined friends from international schools in creating Japan's first Web pages. Associated Press

After developing some of the country's hottest Net ventures, the 37-year-old entrepreneur has a new mission: Making the journals known as weblogs, or blogs, not just a thriving business but also a key element of everyday life here.

Ito's blog (joi.ito.com) draws ceaseless chatter from a burgeoning cybercommunity on a range of topics from Iraq to the U.S. presidential election and the latest in technology.

People from around the world swap links to news stories and humorous video footage in a crisscrossing web of friendships and streams of consciousness that shift as quickly as real-life conversations.

"Weblogs are doing a lot of what people were excited about the Net when it first came out — the fact that anyone can be a publisher," Ito said at his Tokyo office while clicking now and then on blogs.

Ito stands out as a rare cosmopolitan entrepreneur in a nation where the elite tend to be notoriously conservative and insular. Possessing a Westernized upbringing fairly unusual for Japanese, Ito "got" the Internet just as it began to catch on in the 1990s.

A college dropout, he is the founder and chief executive of Neoteny Co., a venture capital firm that has raised $40 million. Ito has helped set up or run such companies as Infoseek Japan, the nation's second-largest portal after Yahoo! Japan, and Rakuten Inc., Japan's biggest Internet shopping site.

When not jetting around the world to lecture in France about mobile technology or sit on blogging panels at U.S. tech conferences, Ito advises the Japanese government and appears on Japanese talk shows.

But he gets his most attentive audience on his blog.

Known to friends as Joi, Ito keeps up an intense blogging habit, visiting 190 blogs regularly and averaging five hours a day reading and writing blogs. He's even stopped drinking — to spend more time on blogs and less in bars.

"Joi is an incredibly dynamic person," said Justin Hall, an American writer on technology culture and a friend of Ito's for several years. "He's got a fantastic curiosity. His metabolism or something — he's wired a little different."

The issues Ito and other bloggers cover are broad — human rights, cool Web sites, cooking and, of course, blogging about blogging.

Blogging is such an integral part of Ito's life that he recently decided against expanding Neoteny's dozen-company portfolio to focus on Six Apart Ltd., the California company behind Movable Type and TypePad, among the leading tools for blogging.

He promotes the technology in Japan as chairman of Six Apart's Japanese subsidiary.

Ito also leads the international and mobile operations of Technorati Inc., a Web service that ranks blogs by popularity and monitors the Net for the latest buzz among bloggers.

Blogs have been rapidly growing in popularity in Japan, catching on especially in the past year at a pace that's believed to lag behind only the United States. At least a dozen companies in Japan provide blogging services. Internet service provider Nifty, which licenses Six Apart's software, has drawn about 25,000 bloggers.

Most of the blog services are free so far. But once blogging gains acceptance as a self-publishing medium, business opportunities such as advertising and premium photo-sharing services should emerge.

Ito has yet to launch a specific moneymaking service for bloggers, but he has created a Neoteny blogging team to feed the fad.

In a society that emphasizes conformity and harmony, blogging makes it easier for people to express unpopular opinions and get tangled in emotional debates.

"The thing neat about weblogs is you find each other," Ito said. "It gives you a feeling of empowerment. For grassroots movements and things like that, it will be great."

Junjiro Hara, who has known Ito for decades, is sold on blogging and prefers it as an outlet for his views than his real job at major newspaper Asahi Shimbun.

"Japan can't change for the better until it becomes a place where everyone starts blogging," Hara said.