Since everyone have finished celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah or any other holiday during December, the end of the year is coming and it’s time to reflect back on Anime blogging for the year of 2014 as a whole along with any goals and changes I have in store for the new year.
First off, 2014 was a pretty mixed year for me. So, let’s focus on the good. For my Japanese self-study progress, I felt that I understood more Japanese than I did last year. This is because I started memorizing words that I come across that I don’t know from video games, especially the ones that are on the JLPT. In addition, I started taking memorization of Kanji more seriously when I memorized all the common radicals while pairing any vocabulary I know so I can have an easier time remembering them. Surprisingly, I was able to understand more of the text in these video games without referring to the dictionary as much. While I only got to the third chapter in the Advanced Japanese textbook, I hope that I will finish it by June so I can move on to possibly taking the third level of JLPT. I will see how much I can accomplish during my job search.
As for Anime blogging, it had some ups and downs. Traffic wise, while I manage to break a new record at one point with the blog having 1273 page views in a day during March. Sadly, it kind of collapsed in the last few months after Google changed their algorithm, which impacted sites that have duplicate or low quality content. As a result, I have experienced a traffic drop of 60%. It took me a while to fix it by excluding all the archive pages because of duplicate content, excluding certain pages/posts and remove the broken links. From fixing all the broken links, it made me realize how much the Anime Blogosphere changed during the 6 years I have been blogging. There are good amounts of Anime blogs that simply do not exist anymore or are inactive, including the ones this year.
After reading Yumeka’s post on why blogging still matters, I wanted to share my thoughts about social networking in general and it’s impact on Anime blogging and forums. People argue that social networking like Twitter and Facebook is changing how we share ideas and they are replacing blogs and forums. While I am cynical when it comes to social networking not because of the privacy issues, inability to post long-form posts and for the fact that not everyone in the blogosphere follows/friends each other, the turmoil that is still happening in the gaming fandom makes me feel that social network sites like Twitter and Facebook is not a great place to have a serious discussion about anything. Although the decline is contributed by the popularity of new forms of media such as videos and podcasts, I still think that blogging will have a place for years to come, especially for long-form content such as editorials, impressions and reviews.
As a whole, I feel that 2015 will be a year for change personally. Since I completed my last semester of my Master’s degree in Information Technology, I will be doing my usual job search. Although I will have expenses such as student loans and such, I might decide to go to an Anime convention in the near future. It really depends if I need to move and what location (most likely in the mid-Atlantic region, including Southern New Jersey), but Otakon is a good possibility. If I decide to go, I will either have a live blog or the usual coverage post with a lot of photos.
As for the types of content I will be writing next year, it’s not going to change much even though I may only post 2-4 times each week when I start working and focus more on long-form content such as editorials and reviews. Not only that, I will finally overhaul the side blog to reflect the name change, something that I wanted to do ever since I got a new moe domain name back in November.
For the games I plan on covering this year, they are Love Live Paradise, Tales of Innocence R, Dekamori Senran Kagura, Madoka Magica Battle Pentagram, Hanayamata Yosakoi Live, Neptune Rebirth 3 and possibly Senran Kagura: Estival Versus. I will cover additional games depending on when I will get my first job. Despite that, I will have more than enough games to cover for 2015 at least.
With that, I wish everyone a Happy New Years. I’ll see you in 2015!
お正月、おめでとうございます。 ¶
Glad you’ll continue blogging. I believe aniblogging is still an important thing like you said since sometimes Twitter and Facebook limits the content length you can post or your content is not taken seriously.
See you in 2015!
Yep, the main issue with social networks is not only the character limit, but for the fact that the environment is a bit casual and arguments/debates usually devolve to like/dislike. Given the nature of social networks, people tend to react quickly, most often in an a nasty way such as harassment or even attempting to silence them by doing massive blocking campaigns just because he/she does not agree with a particular opinion, which is wrong. Controlled environments such as blogs and forums are a better way to share thoughts as there will at least be moderator or a site owner if things go out of hand.
But aside from that, I wish you a happy new year.
Happy New Year and hope you have a good one.
I do hope that 2015 will be better… and also thanks.