Anime Blogosphere is not Anime Blogosphere Anymore.
(4 votes, average: 4 out of 5)
Loading ...As the title says. Times are changing, people are moving on, and new ways of doing the same things are appearing.
Once upon a time, there was only one way to get your anime blog big. The hard way, via begging owners of RSS aggregator sites like Animenano to list you, and then beg the more popular blogs to link you, then write good posts, comment on other people’s post and spam links on forums. But these days, we have the easy way, courtesy of Danny Choo.
First an intro, our dear friend Danny, is the most prolific blogger of Japan stuff, which occasionally includes anime. His site has grown from a humble blog, to a sprawling user-content-driven otaku portal, and he is even employed by the likes of Good Smile and Max Factory for web services, which lets him get even more up close to otaku dream land. Recently, he even appeared on CNN, where his dad, famed shoe designer Jimmy Choo (ask your female friends, if you have any, they will know) was shocked to learn his son prances around Japan in a storm trooper suit while dancing with plastic figurines.
I don’t really browse his site though unless some interesting-sounding post pops up on my featured feeds, which not coincidentally is a scheme pioneered by Danny himself to drive hits between blogs. Pretty useful one I must add. The reasons I don’t browse his site are generally the overload of content which makes it hard to navigate, the slow loading time from the tonnes of comments and avatars, and most important of all, there isn’t actually much content from the man himself. It’s been a long inside joke among us bloggers that Danny’s posts most of the time involve the formula "Japan + X" where X = anything ranging from soft drinks to women and he spends more time on building the site than writing posts.
Nevertheless, it is important to note that his community-forming initiatives, such as otaku.fm and now-defunct figure.fm and many more, have huge numbers of otaku participants whose interests are a lot more than just anime.
The anime blogosphere has gotten so big it can now no longer be called just the "anime blogosphere", as stated on aggregators like Animenano. Perhaps a more fitting nomenclature would be Akiba Culture Blogosphere but that’s not catchy. There are blogs on Japan idols of the live flesh kind, blogs that concentrate solely on merchandise like figures, blogs that do pure anime, blogs that snipe other blogs, blogs that talk about seiyuu, blogs that don’t post much like this one and most recently, plenty of blogs which focus on the previously-neglected areas of otakudom. It becomes thus odd to continue calling these anime blogs.
Is Danny Choo an anime blogger? Of course not, calling him thus would be discrediting the scale of his site. Should the anime blog aggregators have him on their list? Maybe. How about the Jlist blog, that talks about Japan in general? No?
So, it seems the easier way of getting an anime blog big is to post a lot of comments, links of your site and other content on Danny’s portals where his massive legions will click. But is it that simple? I notice that the crowd is very different, when it comes to those who get their traffic from the "easy" and the "hard" way. Most of the people who frequent the Danny Choo portals don’t appear to visit the more traditional anime RSS aggregators, and vice versa. DO YOU THINK SO?
Speaking of easy ways, just do a weekly satirical review of a popular Sunrise anime with funny screen caps, and flame bad fansubbers and you will proceed to completely overhaul the people who visit your site. Poor Darkmirage, his site used to be frequently by intelligent people of some standard, but these days his Code Geass posts have 300 people talking about whether Lelouch is more handsome than Suzaku and whether Kallen is their wife.
Oh yeah, here’s a shout out to our first Singaporean anime blogger marriage! 0ne, previously known as Zer0, got married last week on the night before my Chemical engineering mid term exam (which I have since failed). In attendance were some of the brightest talents in the local arts/anime/otaku scene, such as Zemotion (famous young female photographer), Imaginary Friends’ Studio (yes those who did the Dota loading screen) and many others, since Zer0 is well acquainted in the local scene. LianYL, Kokanaden, Double and myself were there too, hiding in the corner like true otaku. Did I mention that Double looks like a mini-Madarame from Genshiken?
Congrats, Zer0 and I bet your blog will stop being updated.
The groom is the well-dressed one.
Here’s me with the author of BRstick and the President of the NUS anime club.
A close up of live action Madarame, blurred out by shallow depth of field.
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28 Responses to “Anime Blogosphere is not Anime Blogosphere Anymore.”
- 1 Pingback on Sep 21st, 2008 at 3:20 am
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“The groom is the well-dressed one.”
But you’re pretty well-dressed yourself.
That was a whole lot of testosterone in those photos. O:
LOL. Double does kind of look like Madarame. But less skeletal-looking.
I pretty much failed my mid term exam too. Though not from attending a wedding =P
Wow he really does look like Maradame :O
Congrats on the wedding. XD Mine’s slowly coming up too =3
Madarame >__>
Yeah, i agree about Danny Choo. A lot of his readers are not purely “anime otaku” but rather Japanophiles, which is why my dp jumpstarted my blog.
T-T sadly i wasnt there. Speaking of which, i agree that the blogosphere isnt an anime blogosphere anymore. In fact, we predicted this to happen years ago didn’t we? That aside, time to pimp mah new site! Do link it ya? And no, my older site is still alive, just more… “personal” now.
My new site: http://naka-dashi.org/
TJ looks just like how I imagined him
>> DO YOU THINK SO?
I think so. I think Danny Choo is doing a great thing with community building but I don’t read his blog nor am interested in most of the user content hosted on his main site. Likewise I don’t imagine most of my readers do too.
To be honest, that’s the wrong way to look at the anime blogosphere. It’s more about variety than authority that makes one thrive. What makes Danny Choo cool is that he drives both up.
Danny Choo’s site is wild, like a circus. It has grown so much, but I think it’s confusing to someone who goes there for the first time. I agree that “anime blogging” is just not enough to contain it all.
オタク圏 にようこそ!
Danny Choo is Jimmy Choo’s son? wtfbbqomg
I’ve been recently following Uncle 0ne’s wedding diaries, found it real sweet. I’m just too shy to post a comment so I’ll just say my congratulations here XD
I get overwhelmed by Danny Choo’s site most of the time so I rarely drop by and comment. One of our chefs however, has abandoned our blog but continues to be a loyal Danny Choo follower, commenting on almost every post! x__x;
And I’ve been wondering who Double looks like since I saw his pic… and yes, it’s no other than Madarame!
also tj, I was expecting a rant post of some sort when I first read the title… and was pleasantly surprised it didn’t turn out that way XD
Usagijen: I had a strong urge to write something that would let me get flamed, but in the end there was nothing mean to write about. Poor Double must be feeling insulted being compared with Madarame and not Kousaka haha.
Hinano: You better prepare a live web feed for the wedding…
mini madarame looks hotter than madarame lmao.
Now everyone thinks I’m Madarame >_> Jeez…
Madarame is otaku GAR
he is made of win.
so cheer up yeah?
Thanks for the well wishes
btw, LianYL’s expression looked like 囧
Funny that I read your post today. I recently started my blog and am trying to get my blog ‘big’ using both the hard and easy way. Heck, I just linked to Danny today morning!
Anyways, you’re correct in that ‘anime blogging’ isn’t about animes anymore. In fact, I blog about animes, games and trance. And with time will be expanding into more categories like reviewing figures and perhaps some TV shows (like Heroes, Lost or even Top Gear). That said, I’m still passionate about these things, which therefore makes me an Otaku.
At the end of the day, we all like something intensely and talk/ blog about it. So shouldn’t the evolved state of ‘anime blogging’ be appropriately called ‘Otaku blogging’ henceforth?
Some people are using the term “otakusphere” to note the expansion of the topics covered and the focus that people blog about. I think it works if you don’t want to consider it an “anime blogosphere” anymore. But I’m not sure that matter of what we call the community is that important to worry about.
I don’t really agree with some of the comments. I don’t think DC was ever exclusively an anime blogosphere to begin with. It’s pretty much always be a “Otaku-related” site. There has always been a wide array of topics on there. But now that members have the ability to create their own posts it has become even wider. I don’t really have an opinion about it either way since I filter through the stuff I’m only interested in.
More like DC is about this foreign dude being able to break into the “keep-only-to-themselves” japan industry.
He’s a chinese from a western country in japan and is widely coveted by otaku companies. That’s the dream of, i daresay, every otaku here in sg to go over there and make it big or make changes to the otaku community around the world from the core itself.
Unless of course you are into anime SOLELY for the anime, and has no interest in whatever culture the japanese does and prefer to close up to this tiongland over here lol, otherwise DC’s japanese ‘insert random action” here are interesting reads. and serve to educate japanophiles out there more about the country they so dream of staying in.
in a very good light.
I would dare say we shouldn’t call the anime blogosphere as it is. It needs a new name, somewhere where the interest in anime (as well as its related merchandise/figurine collection), comic books and manga, games, both Western and Japanese origins, as well as the lifestyle associated with these three aspects, converge.
Several variations of the name had already existed: ACG (animation, comics, games), Japanophilia (because most of the things we indulge at the moment, are actually from Japan), and, (I think this deserves mention) DC.
I think you should make a new post to come up with a new name for this lifestyle blogosphere. What do you think?
I was just thinking the other day how the bloggersphere has changed too. This post reflects it nicely TJ. Ah well. I also hardly bother about DC.com anymore and just read Otaku.fm. I should start reading ANano’s aggregator.
I’ve been thinking that about DC for a while now as well, but I think it’s a good thing rather than a bad thing. We already have so-called anibloggers that cover pretty much every side of the spectrum, from analytical reviews to figure photoshoots, so it’s nice to have a site with nothing and EVERYTHING at the same time. Of course, it can also take quite some time to filter through what you don’t need.
Oh yeah, and Double really does look like Madarame 0_o
I think the “anime blogosphere” is something which deserves to meet its end, as really the cultural arena is much broader than simple anime, and if you spend a lot of time with the big japanese sites, you will soon notice that none of them are really anime-centric; most are wide sites like DC, or dare I say it, Sankaku Complex. Even specialist Japanese sites tend to be more liberal in their focus, which would be a good thing in general for the English language sites as it would spread the focus away from just anime and manga.
One point about Danny’s program you overlook is that these days it is probably the main source of his inbound links - in all probability the effect on his PageRank is massive, since he has hundreds of non-nofollowed feeds pointing to every one of his articles. I hesitate to call it a “scheme”, but surely that is one of the unspoken objectives. How else can he get a 30 word piece to rank number one in Google, higher in most cases than long sites all about the topic in question? This is the reason for his “Japan+” titles.
I notice he’s been resorting to all kinds of amusing tricks lately (like sticking “torrent” in the title of an article for no good reason other than to garner hits), but I suppose we can just follow his example to our advantage. To my chagrin, I have on occasion resorted to the hated “Hentai” in some titles, so I can hardly complain.