Two years ago I wrote about how the Fuji Rock Festival's website saved me a two-hour trip to the festival. Early reports accurately painted a grim picture of chaos created by a freak typhoon, so I decided to stay in Tokyo.
That year, two people were in charge of putting together the festival's home page. At this year's festival — held July 30 to Aug. 1 in Niigata Prefecture — there were 12 web reporters; I was among them.
It was a motley crew, but this is precisely why it worked so well. We were foreigners and Japanese, specialists and generalists, journalists and nonjournalists (designers, web masters, music experts).