Playing with RSS Feeds and a rant about Gaijinpot
Just playing around with some RSS feeds, using the Feedlist plugin for wordpress from Bill Rawlinson. Wordpress is pretty amazingly versatile in what it can do; one never ceases to be surprised.
The previous post - Jobs in Japan - takes the first 10 job postings at Gaijinpot.com and displays them. I will be looking into putting up some more pages to help job seekers in Japan on this site over the next coupld of weeks. Gaijinpot is a good site if you are looking for English teaching or other language based jobs here in Japan.
Having used the Gaijinpot site for a number of years it looks like they are trying to push things more towards the IT and business job finding market - as that of course is more lucrative. Personally I feel that they have the English teaching job listing market pretty much tied up - so they will have to be careful they don’t alienate that user base too much. As it is they run a forum section of the site, and sometimes posters on there can be a bit harsh on Gaijinpots’ advertisers. So they do have to walk a fine line between deleting over the top posts and annoying their user base (which is what they offer to the advertisers) or pandering to the slathering trolls on the Gaijinpots forums and conversely taking fire from their advertisers.
From my point of view, while it isn’t always an easy call to make, I would say side with the employees - of course there will always be complete nut cases (especially on such forums), but the majority of users are just normal people looking to have an enjoyable and productive time in Japan. The companies the posters bitch about, if they really are that bad wont be able to stay in business in the long term.
The ongoing saga of Nova is a case in point. They aren’t out of business yet, although a lot of their staff still haven’t been paid and a fair few of their schools have been closed. And yet while Nova was in business and paying for (? did they) advertising on the Gaijinpot site, threads relating to Nova were monitored and objectionable content was deleted. Now of course that has stopped (duplicate content is still deleted) but to be honest deleting such threads only works in the short to mid term with a long term negative effect.
An American company was in the news yesterday for its’ lack of a sense of humour. Abercrombie which apparently is an apparel retailer in New York couldn’t see the amusing / interesting side of a piece of performance art by Improv Anywhere which involved 110-odd males simultaneously taking off their shirts in the company’s New York store. You can read more about the story here: No Shirts. The thing is, that while I had heard the name I knew very little about the brand, and now I know a bit more about them and it isn’t a positive impression.
Keeping that balance between what your audience / consumers want and what your clients want is a fine line.
2 Comments, Comment or Ping
CodeRot
Those guys at GaijinPot are c@+kskers.
Still, it can be a fun place to hang out — but I don’t agree with them helping Nova out. They should be looking at the post-Nova environment, and the business possibilities the death of Nova will present.
Oct 25th, 2007
psymeg
Interesting comment and cheers for dropping by. I have never meet the people from Gaijinpot so I can’t really judge them.
You are quite right that they need to be looking to the future.
Your website is pretty interesting too.
Oct 28th, 2007
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