After the overwhelming response I had with the previous editorial I wrote on how the Anime Blogosphere is filled with posts that are not even closely related to Anime and filled with boring rehash of mostly news and photoshots of figurines, no wonder AnimeNano are filled with not so interesting or good quality posts. I decided to write a second part of the editorial… How OEG shows what’s wrong with the Anime Blogosphere.
When the Otaku Elimination Game post it’s first review of select blogs, people have shun it outright for being a troll blog, but they do bring a point…. Anime blogs are becoming less about Anime and more about pointless stuff like random Japan news, photo shots of figurines and how much RAM you use on your computer, etc… It eeems that these days, Anime Blogs are becoming way too personal and people are beginning to post personal experiences too much compared to the ratio of actual anime/manga reviews and anime/manga related editorials and commentaries. Sure it’s okay to add your own thoughts to news, but the problem is that news even though you add thoughts to your news can outrun your anime content.
The problem is that the Anime Blogosphere is filled with alot of not so good blogs, believe it or not… Sturgeon’s Law is alive… and 90% of the blogs you see on AnimeNano and in the Anime Blogosphere is crud … and most of these blogs die after a few months and never become active again… The problem is that fansubs have gotten so easy to obtain that bloggers want in and we see more quantity over quality. We seem to forgot that years ago when Anime Blogs are less about what it is today and more like spoilers… The problem is that people seem to not put enough effort in their Anime Blogs, which can we see from the overwhelming majority of not so good blogs on WordPress.com, and most of these bloggers complain they don’t have enough time and end up not updating. We see way too many copycats of successful anime blogs like That Anime Blog, Random Curiosity, or even Danny Choo that Anime Blogs seem to have no uniqueness, which the OEG seems to be stressing greatly… Bloggers should be more creative and make their blogs more unique… perhaps making your own format and even doing something more creative… Innovation isn’t the problem, but quality of content and the number of copycat blogs out there…
Lastly, AnimeNano seems to be less about Anime and Manga, but more on pointless and uninteresting things about Japan and Anime/Manga/Visual Novel/Light Novel unrelated stuff. As pointed out, AnimeNano atleast doesn’t have Sankaku, but it still doesn’t make it any better because there is still blogs like Sankaku out there that doesn’t even talk about the stuff I mentioned… Anime Nano seriously need some kind of feature that allow you to flag that kind of content so that it won’t pollute AnimeNano… (No offense to anyone who operate that type of blog) or a better way, have a option to view Anime/Manga/Visual Novel/etc related stuff in one feed and another feed with Japan stuff, video games, etc.
The OEG should make people want to improve their blogs, not go in the corner and fear about their blogs being attacked and not doing something about it… Also, Bloggers should blog more, emphasizing on quality posts and make their blogs more unique from other blogs.
Note: I’m not against any kind of censorship whatsoever. I’m hoping I’m not beating a dead horse over this… but this will be the last post on this matter.
Actually, Anime Nano was created with the intent to allow users to filter out blogs they like. You can simply subscribe to the ones you like, and ignore the rest. When it was created, it was explicitly stated that figure blogs were fine too.
AnimeNano is just a massive RSS feed though. I really don’t expect much when I go there. And I think that it has a personality of its own — it’s not really just anime/manga, it’s more of anime/manga + all other related things. Visual Novels, music, etc. are all part of that certain niche, and considering how prolific it is I think that it’s a substantially large and significant niche.
Also if you don’t like AnimeNano have you tried AnimeKisa? AnimeKisa tends to filter out a lot of the excess stuff because it’s not automated to just pull everything out of the blue; it’s editorially hand-picked.
But I’m not sure how much “Anime news” there can really be for the blogosphere.
@psgels: I know you can subscribe to those blogs, but not what I’m looking for. I meant filtering out content you flag on the main page without blocking any others out.
@hmm: There are alot, but this can drive me to make my own Anime Blog index with only good blogs without this crap…
Then again, there is always Google Reader and RSS clients, but some people don’t have the patience to subscribe to RSS feeds individually.
Once again, good points. I rarely do news posts or episode-by-episode reviews because 1) lots of people get to them before I do, and thus 2) many other people post them, so I’d rather do something more unique. And I’ll leave figure or other merchandise posts to those with better cameras.
I just stick to reviews of anime I watch and essays about anime-related topics. If I fancied up my blog and wrote more posts focusing just on what people want to read about, I could get more visitors, but I’m only concerned with getting my thoughts out there.
.-= Yumeka´s last blog ..Autobiography of How I Became an Anime Fan (2009 edition): chapter 3 =-.
I should point out that one of the *benefits* of the free, self-published nature of the Internet is that you don’t have a “publisher” to tell you what sort of content you are and aren’t allowed to post and so editorializing the balance of content and opinion. Of course, I too just skim through 90% of the blog posts I see on aggregators (using Google Reader, of course — couldn’t imagine sorting through it all without it), but most of the tenets in this post are just personal opinion — things like not enough anime content, too derivative, too much stuff you’re not personally interested in, etc. If you take the attitude that you should just eliminate all the voices that aren’t typically interesting, you’re precluding the possibility of “moments of genius”, “changes of heart”, and “rising stars”, among others.
Also I should say that calling it the “anime blogosphere” probably isn’t that useful anymore. Back 5+ years ago, the experience of most English fans *was* just anime. Some people read manga, and some bought figures, but very few were exposed to the much wider range of merchandise in Japan. So it isn’t all that surprising that people have branched out and discovered other things that interest them beyond just anime. And of course, people aren’t only using their blogs to provide “content”, they’re using them to keep in touch with their friends. They could use Flickr or Twitter or other tools, but who says they must? They’re all just tools. The choice as a reader is to subscribe or not subscribe — you can’t kick people off the Internet anymore than someone could try to kick you off, and “shaming” people into better behaviour implies that your own values are more important than their own.
So all that said, your later comment sort of alludes to where you’re going with all this. “The Internet needs an Editor, and I should be that Editor.” Which is, unsurprisingly, very similar to the attitude of the OEG. Creating your own aggregator with “hand-picked” content sounds like an interesting idea, and I’m sure that many who share your values on what’s important in content would benefit. But I know, for example, that I personally don’t really care for most people’s “anime news and reviews”, so I probably won’t be a subscriber. But that’s the good thing about our current system — sure, there are a lot of things that I probably won’t be interested in, but I have access to wide variety of content of all sorts and can make my own choice about what interests me. I can be my own editor and pick out the content that suits *me* and not anyone else; that’s empowerment. And if we start losing faith in people’s ability to parse through the information and make their own decisions about what is and isn’t interesting, I feel like, in a way, we’re doing them a disservice.
@relentlessflame: I know where you getting at… my intentions is not to complete get rid of that content, but I felt that it somehow when I open the feed site like AnimeNano, the feed is overrun or say overabundance on content like that… What I’m hoping to get at is AnimeNano having some kind of functionality that split the feed into two. Once about Anime/Manga/Visual Novels/etc and another about Figurines/News/random stuff. Anyone is free what to write about the blog, I’m not against that since I believe that anyone should be entitled to write about anything they want, but it seems that uniqueness of Anime Blogs went down since they share the same format that other Anime Blogs follow and not being their unique blog. Anyone can do a anime review like Random Curiosity does… but what’s different about it?
A new Index would be a good idea, but the problem is like you mentioned that I will have some kind of conflict of interest. For example, I don’t like mecha or hot-blooded shouen action anime… The fear is that I would filter that content, which can upset the users who use the index… The index would look good on paper, but in practice, it’s actually more complicated.
I know users can subscribe and unsubscribe blogs and I’m totally against any kind of censorship, but index sites like AnimeNano should organize itself more so users don’t have to scroll through non-anime blog posts finding something about anime related stuff versus someone who is looking for something who is interested in something in Japan and doesn’t have to look through the anime stuff.
Well, now you’re at least on the path towards a workable solution, but I think there are still a few issues. The big problem is that many blogs aren’t just “anime blogs” or just “figure blogs” or however you choose to divide it out. If you somehow forced people to pick one stream or the other, you’ll end up with weird overlaps and odd categorizations. Plus, you’re now adding the complexity of having a user-selectable “Stream A” and “Stream B” , and people who may have some overlapping interests in these somewhat-arbitrary categories might end up just picking both anyway, leaving them right back where they started.
So let’s say you went with a more advanced method. Let’s say that you allowed each blog owner to select the top three categories that best describe their blog, and then allowed people to select all the categories that interest them. As long as the blog was in one of the categories that interested you, it’d appear in your feed. It seems on the surface like a way to clean things up, but the problem is that most bloggers use aggregators as a way to get more hits. So, it’s virtually assured that everyone will want to put their blog in the most popular categories (like “anime”, for example) in order to have the most impact, even if that really wouldn’t be their true “top three” categories. So now are you going to somehow police the categories and have some method of re-categorizing blogs that don’t really fit the stated pattern? Never mind that over time people’s interests may drift, and what was once an anime blog may drift into being a light novel/figure/merchandise blog, or whatever…
By the time you work through all the details of a possible implementation for this idea, I think you’ll be right back where you started in terms of the need for editorializing and human-managed listing, and that brings with it the concerns about censorship, the issue of personal taste, the potential of a lot of administrative effort, and so on…
In the end, I think the only practical solution is for people to use RSS readers like Google Reader and build their own customized list of sites that interest them over time. For example, subscribe to the AnimeNano feed for a month, and use the “star” feature to mark every article that interested you. Then, at the end of the month, go through you starred list and subscribe directly to the blogs that interest you the most and remove your subscription to AnimeNano. That way you’ve built your own personalized collection of blogs you like. After six months, you could do the same thing again to find any new blogs or sites that you’ve been missing and didn’t already discover “organically”.
The drawback to the self-published world is certainly the personal effort it takes to do the relevance sorting that, in the old days, an editorial team did on your behalf. This is why some circles are calling for a return to a more managed system to help them deal with the information overload. But I don’t think you can have the benefits of an open, free publishing community without the drawback of having to personally sift through the rough to find the diamonds. In the end, I think it’s mostly about finding systems that can help you process the information you’re being fed more effectively so that the sorting takes up less of your time.
I’d already been a bit annoyed at what some of the anime blogosphere passed off as “content,” and so, the OEG was something I had welcomed because it gave a voice to my discontent.
And yes, like everyone else seems to be doing, I’ve been filtering out the blogs I dislike through feed subscription on Nano or Google Reader. It keeps me less annoyed at seeing some of my anime blog pet peeves come up.
As I’ve said on melative already, the OEG might have its uses and stuff, but the problem is now that more and more people from the peanut gallery start blaming others for a proclaimed “oversaturation” or “downturn” of the sphere, which is a contradiction in itself…
It’s quite understandable though, since the moustachio’d bandwagon seems to offer them a nice moral high ground for their own gripes with several concepts on community, available content and, omg, the internet. I thought Google Reader was old technology, why are people still complaining?
That’s just laughable, and I massively enjoy the hypocrisy and circus around this topic.
But who am I to speak, I have already been “eliminated”, so this might just seem like passive-aggressive banter.
.-= nekosasu´s last blog ..Season Halftime: Nyan Koi! =-.
If a blog you enjoy is successful, wouldn’t it be hard to actually resist trying to copy it? And also, what if you copy it to only a certain point and then the rest is all your unique style, then is that also categorized as copying or being unique?
And I also just read the post the OEG said about me after about 2 weeks of slacking off of reading it, and I couldn’t find anything that suggested that I should make my blog more unique…they focused on a single post I wrote about them and that was all…and they said that I misused the word “otaku”…
But it doesn’t seems like anime blogs are trying to polish up by becoming more unique for the OEG, and neither is the OEG trying to grade people on their uniqueness, but more on how they use the word “otaku” and other parameters I’m not aware of.
As well as, nowadays, more people care about quantity than quality. It seems that just if there’s a huge amount of typed words, then it seems to appeal to a reader in a way that is very unusual to me. It also seems to somehow show how much time they took on the post.
Oh yeah! And also, blog ideas are tired out nowadays so people can’t exactly be unique now because their good ideas have been either taken been someone else or used before. After a long while, an anime blog will soon have the same exact ideas as another anime blog, and so the uniqueness just fades away.
.-= SiRiRu´s last blog ..True Tears Episode 4-Okay, Splashy Splashy =-.
@nekosasu: I realize something, I think the OEG is looking in the wrong place and just making their judgements on “otaku” and not on the actual content, which pretty much can confuse any views on how bad anime blogs are when they aren’t that bad… OEG does seem to overblown how bad the anime blogs are when in reality, it’s not that bad as it seems… Besides from that, there was some instance when someone complained that the anime blogosphere is filled with too much K-ON! posts… not the first time at all… http://is.gd/59dSg
This OEG crap is tiring me out, so I’m just going to stick with Anime/Manga/Visual Novel stuff instead of continuing about writing this stuff… I will let the other bloggers beat the dead horse on this topic while I continue on… Besides, I enjoy blogging about Anime more than writing on the Anime Blogosphere in general and also OEG.
@SiRiRu: I know it’s hard, but some effort can overcome it… and I think OEG is overlocking the part of uniqueness alot… probably another fatal flaw in their campaign
It’s alright not to post for a few weeks since I haven’t posted much when I was on vacation during the summer in Wisconsin…. but it ended well.. =p
I think it’s time to stop hitting the dead horse… I’m going back to using a RSS Reader (Times.app) instead of going onto AnimeNano and looking at some headlines like “Man arrested in Japan”, although I will still have my blog listed….