Weekly Blog Parts: Sekisui BlogHeim

Japanese pre-fab house builder Sekisui has created a nifty little blog part that allows you to create your own little Sims-like homestead for your blog. Of course your house is chosen from Sekisui’s digitalized collection of modern homes, and you can pick your own family, the weather, and a special message. There’s also a photo album feature that we uploaded a few to.

The marketing aspect is that you get to test out the house, kick the tires as it were, against the elements by the click of a button. Earthquakes and fires might destroy the neighboring homes, but not the Domani LX!

Build your own Sekisui digital pad here (Japanese only). However, there’s a burglar around as well, so don’t say you weren’t warned.

Tags: Blog Parts, Pre-Fab

Weekly Blog Parts: Cup Noodle Timer

Nissin, maker of the classic Cup Noodle instant ramen that has helped keep students in beer money for a few decades, has now begun a campaign to modernize in an ECO-friendly way. Gone are the old polystyrene cups, and in are the paper cups that have been dominating the low-calorie instant ramen market as of late.

Nissin has already been producing it’s Eco Cup refills for some time now, but this doesn’t seem to have caught on well with consumers who prefer a cup with their Cup Noodles.

Above is an embeddable “blog part” widget that can be your private cup noodle timer.

Pour. Click. Eat.

Tags: Blog Parts, FMCG, food

Weekly Blog Parts: Girls Girls Girls

This week’s Blog Parts are all about the ladies. Don’t worry…..they’re work safe unless you’re a truck driver. In that case, quit messing around and watch the road!

Starting from the left, Cyberclone is a widget to display your favorite idol in your sidebar and interact with her in a limited way. Most importantly, the widget gives you a link to her blog as you can do with the ever-popular Hoshino Aki below.

From ECareer, a subsidiary of Softbank Human Capital, 100 Cheer Girl is a really nice interactive flash site that features 100 girls doing random, non-sexual things on video and then advertising the ECareer job service. You can add your favorite girls into a list, check out the top girls, or get the blog parts (below) that features the girls saying ganbare (you can do it!) in more ways than I ever imagined possible. Interestingly, it’s quite difficult to tell who the site is targeted at. Men who want to see pretty girls, or women who want to see cute girls? The answer, I’m afraid, is both, and this works in Japan.

Finally, on the far right, is a little dome of flowers for the most important girl of them all: Your mom. Click the link and be taken to buy gifts for Mother’s Day.

Tags: Blog Parts, Idols

Weekly Blog Parts - FLO:Q from Sony

Sony’s FLO:Q widget service has come a long way and provides a great depth of content and customizable options for personal blog part widgets. There are standard widgets such as the LOHAS one below, but also more interactive gaming widgets like this one for Spiderwick no Nazo. To create a personal widget as I did below, it’s possible to integrate a large variety of content including photos, flash games, video, RSS feeds, Amazon products, books, music, and others, allowing users to centralize a great deal of their own content into a small part of the sidebar.

Tags: Blog Parts, FLO:Q, Sony, widgets

Weekly Blog Parts: Walky Walky

This week’s Blog Parts are from Glico’s new walky walky candy. The commercials featuring drama star Oguri Shun have been in heavy rotation lately, but click the cup and you won’t be able to avoid seeing him again.

I’m not sure how people will feel about having their cursors and browsers commandeered for exploding candy, but it depends on how much they like Shun-kun. For the record, walky walky is basically little balls that taste like Pocky….but you can walk and eat them at the same time!

Tags: Blog Parts

Weekly Blog Parts: iTunes, Sakura, and Yume Neko

Today we’re starting a weekly series of our favorite “Blog Parts” (ブログパーツ), the name given to all of the strange and wonderful widgets made for the blog-hungry Japanese public (See the Uniqlo Uniqlock).

The iTunes Weekly Chart blog part highlights the top tracks of the week in iTunes Japan.

Even though the cherry blossoms are already beginning to fall off here in Tokyo, they’re peaking elsewhere in Japan despite the recent chilly weather. Sakura Clock shows you the time, but don’t touch the cherry blossoms or they’ll fall off…over and over again.

Remember Yume Neko, the robotic cat? Now the Dream Cat has its own blog part to go along with the DS game from Sega.

Tags: Blog Parts, iTunes, Sakura, Uniqlock, widgets, Yume Neko