Yahoo! Japan launches blog service beta.

JAPAN: Susan Mernit writes:

When did Yahoo! Japan launch a beta set of blogs? Last night?

Much like MSN, it looks like Yahoo's pulled together a nice blogging beta over in the land of kanji--a follow up to their 2003 launch of blog tools with Yahoo Korea. According to Japanese blogger Okanomail.com, this is a recently launched beta; townboy says the system allows publishing 2GB size photos. None of the newswires or tech sites seem to have anything on this yet but the site looks great. It is exciting to think about how blogs can integrate with the My Yahoo! functions and other community focused apps as Yahoo moves these products out into other countries (like the US) and builds them up further.

Other features:

• Each blog has an RSS feed (all flavors) but not Atom. It's not clear which services a blog pings with updates.
• The service has an RSS feed for updated blogs.
• The blogs also accept trackbacks.
• A blog's stats include the count of visitors, comments, and track backs.
• A "favorites" system, lets you add a blog to "My Favorites" and see their updates in a sidebar of your own blog. The number of fans you have (favorites subscribers) shows in your stats. This is a great way to use RSS feeds within an application.
• Like Ryze and other social networks, you can leave a message in a Guest Book, essentially commenting on the blog instead of a specific post.
• You can write posts using wiki grammar, simplified html.
• Access control over posts, like LiveJournal. So you can have a post that's private to the author, to named friends, or to a named group.
• Popular blogs. My favorite: 30-Second Self Improvement, an inspirational word of the day blog, just three days' old.
• No posting by phone. Yet.