I'd like to up the authenticity of my Japanese web experience. I'm currently using Yahoo!JAPAN as my homepage, but it's a bit too, err, effeminate for my taste. Can anyone recommend some other content-rich homepages used by Japanese people? My aim is to increase my exposure to the kind of cultural things a Japanese person might see on a daily basis, in the hope that I might discover some cool new Japanese things as well as increase my language immersion.

Effeminate? What is it, the pink? It's springtime, whole friggin' country's pink right now. Even starbucks: http://www.pronweb.tv/modules/newsdigest...?code=1710

That sakura stuff at Starbucks is mostly gone now actually. The new 期間限定 is an orange+lemon frap. (Yes I do some private lessons at スタバ)

Most Japanese people's computers I've used have the homepage set to Yahoo or Hotmail. I personally use a blank page.

I wonder if I'm the only one who had unclean thoughts about the domain "pronweb.tv"..

ameblo.jp is a really popular blogging site if you're interested in such. It has like 20 000 000 users a month.

mullr Wrote:Effeminate? What is it, the pink? It's springtime, whole friggin' country's pink right now. Even starbucks: http://www.pronweb.tv/modules/newsdigest...?code=1710

No it's not the pink - I like the 桜花爛漫 as a seasonal thing, it's just that the yahoo page makes me feel like I'm unwittingly perusing a women's magazine. I think it's the adverts and the shopping panel that insists on constantly displaying handbags. There is probably a way to turn that off in my yahoo settings, but I haven't managed to find it.

Ameblo.jp looks interesting, probably not as a home page for me but a useful resource. I might stick with yahoo and try to customise it..

I'm a nerd/tech nut so my homepage is Slashdot.org . If you are the same way, you might find http://slashdot.jp/ to your interest.

Note: The stories between the two differ.

I'm real plain. I just use http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/

Tried these? Just Google for most popular sites in Japan and similar things...

http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/JP (More on the Alexa top 10 in Japan: http://blog.btrax.com/english/top-10-mos...n-japan-2/)
http://www.minirank.com/tld/jp/
http://techcrunchies.com/most-popular-we...-in-japan/

Also: http://whatjapanthinks.com/category/polls/internet/ (e.g. http://whatjapanthinks.com/2010/03/23/we...-in-japan/ -- The RSS thing is a little surprising to me... )

I misread btrax on Google.com and conflated it with google.co.jp at first, but it's still interesting to ponder why .com is in the top 10 in addition to .co.jp... Actually, reading the query breakdown at Alexa, I'm thinking .com's only in the top 10 because of the subdomains and tools Google has, especially as those, even from .co.jp, link to the .com (for instance the gmail link from the .co.jp page is .com), so I guess that skews the results. Makes more sense than a massive amount of English searches where users go to .com to perform them rather than elsewhere, as suggested by btrax.

+ Mental Note: In the future, make sure to do Japanese searches on .co.jp sites, I have a bad habit of continuing to use Google.com for such things and using filters like "site: *.jp" or "-cn".