HOW THE BONSAI'S JPOP PAGE GOT STARTED - Byron Kidd (Bonsai)
HOW J!-ENT GOT STARTED - Dennis A. Amith (KeNNeDy)
HOW JPOP.COM (T'S KAWAII JPOP PAGE) GOT STARTED
I no longer go out searching for new pages to add to the JPOP Pages .. I sit back and wait for people to send them in .. there is just no time for browsing the www when you're trying to live and hold down a job. But because of the popularity of the pages new links come in every day .. and the JPOP pages grow into the monster we have today ... they were never intended to get this big. These days I'm not so much of a JPOP fan .. I listen to JPOP of course but its not a big part of my life .. maintaining the pages is a big job but I continue to do it because so many people consider it a valuable resource.
At one stage we had the online version of CD Ichiba .. the JPOP Traders Magazine .. where people could submit what CD's they had for sale/trade and others could search the database by artist, title, style, catalog number etc. A great project but with the JPOP pages jumping around between sites each time I moved I had to re-write the CGI's to talk to a new database .. so eventually it got scrapped .. it may make a comeback .. but I have a lot of other things to do first.
Let me see .. in their short life they have lived at the University of Tasmania, Net5, and now Hatch Japan .. I still find links pointing to Net5 and occasionally links that still point to the University of Tasmania .. a link over 2 years old. They went off line for 3 or 4 months last year when I changed jobs, but the overwhelming mail from fans prompted me to bring them back up.
The latest and most popular addition is the JPOP Search .. this was a turning point .. up until the search came on line the JPOP Pages were pretty much a one man project but now I've formed kind of partnerships (hate that word ..you guys are friends not partners) with people Dennis A. Amith (Kennedy), Grace Houser (Lyrics) and Warren Tsang (MP3) who provide content for the JPOP Search. The search was written in half an hour one lunch hour .. it wasn't planned .. I was bored and did it because I could .. whacked it on the homepage and it was an instant hit.
Soap box: The JPOP pages contain no copyrighted material .. it may look plain without graphics of all the stars but in Japan the copyright laws are a little stricter .. also I don't want to get my company in hot water for hosting a site with copyrighted material. Although .. the JPOP Pages do link to sites with copyrighted material .. but if it isn't on my server it isn't my problem :)
Speaking of looking plain .. no frames, no java script, no java, no dynamic html etc. It may be plain but it makes the pages accessible to even the lowest level of browser .. even the text based browser Lynx. Bonsai is a nice guy who tries to respond personally to all the email he gets :) He is a real person, contrary to popular belief. He is from Australia (Tasmania) but lives and works as a software engineer in Tokyo. He'd rather be doing anything else on the weekend than sitting in front of a computer. He speaks enough Japanese to get slapped by chicks at parties ... Oh and he likes to eat Takoyaki ...
HOW THE J!-ENT GOT STARTED by Dennis A. Amith (Kennedy)
I was asked by many people to start a Japanese Entertainment homepage because #1) I am very outspoken about the Japanese Music Industry #2) It was going to happen sooner or later #3) A good way to brainwash thousands of fans of Japanese Music (Just kidding).
The SPY! "J!" FAN BASE was created on December 21, 1996 (renamed to J!-ENT in 1998). It had a lot of links and was huge and was always going through a change in look. In fact, it changes every season because I get bored really quickly with designs. In fact, don't be surprised if this "How the SPY! NET got started" goes through many changes.
Now, there are many homepages from the Asunaro Club and myself that I can't count how many we do have. All I know is that I appreciate all the support we get from people. We average close to a thousand to two thousand hits a week, #2 next to of course Bonsai's JPOP Page who probably gets like five thousand a week but it's cool. As many people think there is competition between our pages, there's not any. Our pages are very different in content and we both help each other out.
The pages are for the fans and it will stay that way forever. YAY!
KNDY is a dude who doesn't get much sleep, works and studies too much, helps everyone and is an overall nice guy. Oh, he also likes takoyaki.
DISCLAIMER: Due to copyright and permission rights, no material or photography of performers will be used on "The Asunaro Club's guide to Japanese Music" unless permission is received.
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