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In 2008, the same year that Facebook launched its big redesign, Researcher Nick Burcher started collating Facebook usage statistics by country. The 2011 winner for fastest growing user base is Brazil, which grew 300% over the past year. Japan is in a close second, with 254% growth over the past year. But a recent Forrester report notes that the Japanese prefer to stay anonymous online, prefer not to use Facebook because it requires users to sign up with their real names. This high rate of growth in Japan goes in direct opposition from a January 2011 NYTimes story about the country's complete lack of interest in Facebook.

Way back in December of last year, Facebook released its connections map. FlowingData.com recently released an inverse of the Facebook friendship map, showing where in the world people don't use the social network. Facebook has not been able to adequately penetrate the non-Western markets of China, Russia, South Korea and Japan.

The need to just do something is a real reason people aggregate data from real-time sensors, create maps and share their findings online. Crowdsourcing is a manifestation of that desire to contribute in a way that helps us understand and better define the overwhelming amount of data available.

In Japan, crowdsourcing is emerging as a way for people to keep track of the radiation levels around the country, levels that are spiking at times due to the pollution escaping from the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

Pachube is being used to monitor Geiger counters across Japan.

Part of covering the culture of technology is covering technology's use by the culture at large. At a certain point, however, I have had to acknowledge that we are not a general news organization. We don't cover world news, conflicts, crises. We cover technology. And when you attempt to force news to fit inside your frame, you run the risk of deforming it. As @laurenist put it, "Every major news event now also turns into a story about social media."

Social media is common enough, thankfully, that it has become a tool for dealing with news in a larger context. The mere fact that people are using social media in a given situation does not make that a piece of tech news.

Hint: They're Using iPhone Apps

The newspaper industry is in a downward death spiral, having been severely impacted by new technologies, the ubiquity of internet access, and a rise in citizen journalism. Here in the U.S., some papers are filing for bankruptcy, others are close to doing the same, and there's even a proposal to give the newspaper industry a bailout plan of its own. Elsewhere in the world, it's more of the same. In Japan though, the country's high population of elderly citizens is keeping the papers afloat...for now, at least. But like everywhere else, they will soon have to face the future: young people don't do newsprint.

Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology held its annual event for telecom related startups this week and several interesting companies gave presentations. Masaru IKEDA covered the event for the popular English language blog Asiajin and two of the companies caught our eye in particular.

Japan has long been a place where telephony and communications innovation can be found. Much of it is culturally specific but we think the work of companies Peace Mind Corp. and Brand Dialog could translate in interesting ways around the world.