I was searching for a project done by a woman I am meeting on Monday called “kotonoha” and came across kotonoha.cc. Very interestingly because both are related to my work - object interface to information and (given the current direction of things) questions, surveys, and polling for personal expression and satisfying that desire to see what other people think.
Kotonoha.cc looks addictive and with my current Japanese and browser translator I am already enjoying the type of questions posted and the responses. Oh yeah - what is it? It is a site where people can indicate their opinion on various “things” (koto) by choosing “O” or “X” and add a little explanatory comment. The “O” “X” o tsukeru system is the common “yes” “no” system in Japan. Examples of things are:
- which are scarier, spiders or cockroaches
- can you remember numbers past 3.1415
Users have simple profiles (photo, nickname, URL) and you can subscribe to different users and receive feeds of their posts in an site-based inbox.
Browsing the questions so far has been really really interesting. I am not just learning about the people or “community” through their responses but also through the questions they are posing. Yes some (like my examples above) are about mundane, general things but others are about current events, issues, popular things (indicators of what the “current” in the country might be) and others about the kotonoha community itself.
モスバーガーはモスと略す O X
(”mos burger” abbreviate to “mos”?) from what I can tell, most people do. It is good that I know this.
The one thing that bugs me is that they don’t display (from what I can tell) a tally of “O” and “X”. I can see that 690 have responded to the mos burger question and a list of the most recent results and comments…but not those two numbers - how many “O” and how many “X”. But…is this intentional? To avoid bias?
What if it went a step further and I had to respond before seeing any responses/comments? While this might motivate people to respond and eliminate bias from seeing what the majority thinks, it might take away from the experience of being in the kotonoha social space which, now that I think of it, seems less to do with knowing what the majority thinks, what the winning side it, etc. and more to do with knowing that people have an opinion.
