<nettime> Goldsmiths researches Nico Nico Douga (Goetz Bachmann)

["Goetz Bachmann" <goetz.bachmann@gmail.com>]

A new visual language is emerging on the Japanese Internet. Nico Nico Douga
is a Japanese video community, where users place comments directly on the
streamed videos. The anonymous comments are archived and scroll through the
video, when the next users watch the video. The main aim of such commenting
is to take part in the "kuuki" of the comments =96 a shared atmosphere,
mostly, of appreciation. The result is a feeling of pseudo-simultanious
communication (Hamano Satoshi).

This is not the only innovation of Nico Nico Douga. Its collectively
negotiated tags and social bookmark based rankings create a platform, where
new genres and subgenres constantly evolve at high speed. The evolution of
the genres becomes a meta-story on its own (Yoshikawa Hideyuki). More than
one million videos were uploaded in the last 16 months, most of them
self-produced by the fans. The majority of these videos are remixes of
anime, games or TV content. They are thus relatives of AMV (Anime Music
Videos), though wilder, faster, and with a wider range of contents and
references.

Nico Nico Douga's Url is http://www.nicovideo.jp/. You can access the main
interface directly, but if you want to see the videos, you have to
subscribe. However, access is free and pretty easy. If you are interested i=
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academic research about Nico Nico Douga: The Metadata Project, based at the
Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, London, conducts
ethnographic research on it. First results are published on this blog:
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/metagold/. Here you can also find further help how to
access Nico Nico Douga: See the early post "So what is Nico Nico Douga" for
this.

Madoka Takashiro and Goetz Bachmann (members of the Metadata Project).


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