Tech Shout!

Agence France-Presse and Japanese Internet group Softbank have unveiled an interactive Japanese-language website (http://www.afpbb.com) that lets users discuss global and domestic news via blogs and bulletin boards.

AFP-BB is updated 24 hours a day by a team of 25 Japanese-language journalists using AFP’s pool of 2,000 reporters, photographers, editors and graphic artists in 170 countries and territories.

AFP-BB’s unique features include blogs and BBS bulletin boards, which let web surfers post commentary on news stories. Users can also personalise pages according to their interests.

In a news conference in Tokyo, AFP Chairman and Chief Executive Pierre Louette said, “The originality of this project lies with the customers, the users of broadband, who will get the chance to offer comments and debate the news.”

The website is an endeavour between AFP and Movida Entertainment, a unit of Softbank whose Yahoo broadband service covers five million households in Japan.

A third partner is technology firm Creative Link, whose shareholders include trading house Itochu and Japan’s top toymaker Bandai. Creative Link supplies a sports service drawn from AFP news and photos to Japan’s three major mobile telephone operators.

“This kind of high-definition website is quite unique. We hope to be on the cutting edge,” Taizo Son, a director of Movida Entertainment, told the news conference.

Besides AFP, content providers to AFP-BB include Getty Images and Jiji Press, the leading Japanese news agency which has been AFP’s partner since 1949. Paris Mode TV will also offer video coverage of the global fashion scene.

The website, which is entirely supported by advertising, has its homepage opening with three horizontal moving menus — one with the top 100 news stories, the second with the most recent 100 photos and the third with the 100 most visited pictures.

To safeguard intellectual property rights, users cannot print or download the pictures but can keep photos of their choice stocked in files on the website.