I have made many trips to Japan for both business and pleasure. Japan never fails to provide an eye-opening-mind-blowing perspective on the future. I often see things going on that eventually find there way to the U.S. A simple one is cell phones where the Japanese seem to be two years ahead of us. On my last trip two things dazzled. First, the ubiquity of teenagers watching movies on their phones. The second, and I don’t expect to see this one here, was a corner store in Akihabara, the electronics neighborhood, dedicated to smokers. You walk in and light up next to a vent that sucks your smoke out of the building. Drinks and snacks are sold. Imagine a larger corner space with 20 cigarette smoking men all standing in silence doing deep inhaling.

For more Japanese trends check out Trends in Japan. This comprehensive site covers trends in business, fashion, home, arts and entertainment and more.

One of my favorites is talking paper.

I am going to keep this one very neat.

Adliterate, a very smart UK based advertising website, simply has wonderful images supporting its very smart take on the wonderful world of advertising. Check them out. My current favorite image is the town of Dull (scroll down a bit) that supports a smart take on the idea of “low interest category.”

And speaking of smart, how about this one on the penetration of DVRs in the UK. This clearly portends for the USA as well.

Marktd is a site where users rate marketing articles. They did good by us when we launched Podcasting360 so not only do I like them for their generally good list, they did good by us.

Here is their spiel:

“Marktd is a reference system that highlights marketing articles considered valuable by the marketing community. Marketers submit articles they either write or just find on the web and other marketers vote on the value of those articles. The most popular articles reach the front page.”

Marktd is a product of PFSK, a – hmmm, I’m not sure. A Trends publisher I think. Much more on them and their other sites right here. Botom line. They make me a bit smarter when I visit their sites. My favorite is IF.

Imagine a society so screwed up that we use war to solve imaginary problems (like Iraqi WOM) and won’t allow a documentary about 9/11 to use actual human language like “shit.” I was in Manhattan on 9/11 and even priestly people said shit and fuck. Ah, sometimes these words are fairly descriptive and if it’s a documentary, it is about real life.

Who is the FCC protecting?

By the way, what advertiser would actually want her ads to run in a doc about 9/11 anyway?

I am going to start a new thought & handoff stream. The PEW Internet & American Life Project is the first of my “must read” website finds. The mission of the PEW / Internet as listed on the site is:

“The Pew Internet & American Life Project produces reports that explore the impact of the Internet on families, communities, work and home, daily life, education, health care, and civic and political life. The Project aims to be an authoritative source on the evolution of the Internet through collection of data and analysis of real-world developments as they affect the virtual world.”

I have been particularly interested in a few recent reports (you can see these and more in the Report section):

- Bloggers

- Online banking

- Finding Answers Online in Sickness and in Health

- Americans and their cell phones

Another informative section is Trends. You can dazzle your geeky friends (or clients) with this stuff.