Caught a great study group meeting organized by the Agile Media Network last night at the Pasonatech seminar room in Shibuya (here’s the original posting in Japanese). Tokuriki-san, the main person behind the Alpha Blogger Awards, was on the ball as usual moderating the event.

There were four speakers, Ohashi-san from Shigotano, Kobayashi-san who writes at the Polar Bear Blog and also at IT Media, Ishitani-san of Mitaimon, and Hori-san of Lifehacking.jp. I also had the chance to talk to a few other bloggers after the event, the longest chat I had was with Sasaki-san, a “psychology journalist” (心理学ジャーナリスト) who blogs at life hacks psychology (ライフハックス心理学).

The presentations were all great, but it was the last one on Lifehacking.jp that really got me thinking (共感しましたね)。 The author Hori-san (who also happens to be a researcher doing his postdoc) does something very similar to what I do: he introduces English-language blogs to a Japanese-language audience, in his case focusing particularly on three (none of which I had heard of!): 47folders, copyblogger, and problogger. (For more about his presentation see this entry at his blog.)

One thing that surprised me at the event was the amount of attention on Flickr, which is virtually unknown right now in Japan. In his talk about his blog Mitaimon, Ishitani-san wowed the audience with a run-down of how simple it is to drag and drop images from flicker directly into a blog. Maybe this is the start of a Flickr Japan? Who knows, we’ll have to wait and see. Twitter has certainly made a splash here.

I’m kicking myself for not having liveblogged the event (which, judging from the tapping of keys, many others were doing). I understand this was only the third time that AMN has organized this kind of study group (last year there were two), so I’ll definitely try to catch the next one.