Creating product buzz in Japan via blogs

Nice piece in Newsweek about using blogs to create product buzz, that quotes Nob Seki and Ichiro Kiyota from Six Apart Japan. The nut graph:

Fortunately for businesses, Japanese blog entries tend to read like personal diaries or reviews of products, says Nobuhiro Seki, general manager of Six Apart, which introduced blog software to Japan. People talk in detail about what they ate, bought, read and watched on television, and often do so passionately. Nearly half a million blog entries on products (excluding those on politics and social issues) are written each day, according to Blog Watcher. Firms are taking notice now in part because of Web sites that rank bloggers, making it possible to identify the most influential. In addition, in recent months software tools that analyze blog postings for trends and changing preferences have become available for businesses. Blogs are "a frontier of product feedback," says Ichiro Kiyota, marketing director at Six Apart.