livedoor キーワード

» see keyword.livedoor.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

On 16 January 2006 Tokyo prosecutors raided livedoor's offices in Roppongi Hills and the home of its founder, Takafumi Horie. He was arrested on the 23rd. The selling that followed was heavy enough to overwhelm the Tokyo Stock Exchange's systems and force early closes, and it got a name of its own, the Livedoor Shock. The company was delisted on 14 April. Somewhere in the middle of all that, on 20 March 2006, the product teams shipped a new service.

livedoor キーワード had two halves. The first read keywords out of the major Japanese blogs and told you which ones were currently being used, rendered as a tag cloud where a word that was having a big day was printed bigger. Bolted onto that was a trend-reading gimmick that spat out lines in a fixed grammar, the best remembered of which is 韓国俳優の20%はヨン様でできている, twenty percent of Korean actors are made of Yon-sama. That is Bae Yong-joon, and in 2006 in Japan that joke landed, because Winter Sonata had made him the center of the Korean Wave and you could not open a magazine without him in it.

The second half was the encyclopedia. Explanations of the keywords were written by users, not staff, in a markup that was part wiki syntax and part raw HTML, and all you needed to edit was a livedoor ID. To keep it clean the company introduced a premium user tier whose job was to watch for bad edits, which is to say it handed moderation to the users as well. That is the half that did not hold. The explanation feature was abolished on 27 October 2009.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually did ~

Japan had a real tradition here and livedoor was the second entrant, not the first. Hatena Keyword had been running since 2001, auto-linking words inside people's diaries to definitions the community had written, and it worked because the linking happened inside text people were already writing. livedoor's version came at it from the other direction: analyze what the whole blogosphere is saying, surface the hot words, and then ask somebody to explain them. The analysis half was genuinely good. The explanation half was asking volunteers to show up for a company whose founder was in a holding cell.

There is a detail in the record that says a lot about how this was promoted. The site ran a 似顔絵選手権, a caricature championship, collecting portrait drawings from the public. A keyword database with a drawing contest attached is not a strategy anybody would write down today, and in 2006 it was just what a portal did when it wanted people to come back.

By 2006 I had TTNet broadband at home and looked things up in Turkish forums. A user-written dictionary keyed to Japanese blog traffic has no Turkish equivalent worth naming from those years. What we had instead was donanimhaber, where the answer to a question existed but was four pages into a thread, posted by somebody who happened to know.

~ the postmortem ~

The domain gives you a bracket. The Internet Archive has keyword.livedoor.com answering 200 as late as 8 November 2010 and returning a 301 by 28 August 2011, so the standalone site was folded into livedoor News somewhere in those nine months. Today the host has no DNS record at all. The name survives on livedoor ニュースキーワード, which quotes the Japanese Wikipedia article and its related links, so the thing that replaced a user-written encyclopedia is a different user-written encyclopedia with somebody else's moderators.

The parent outlived the product by a wide margin and changed hands repeatedly on the way. NHN Japan bought livedoor, NHN Japan became LINE, and in 2022 the livedoor business was transferred to Minkabu. livedoor 検索 was switched off on 18 May 2020, after which the company stopped describing itself as a portal and started describing itself as news and blogs. Horie served two and a half years starting in 2011, came out, and is a television regular.

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