Riuva : Research Institute for Unicultural Visual Arts

People have been saying that the animeblogging community is saturated. In a sense, that is true. When I first started about 1.5 years ago, my writing was shitty, my blog design was shitty, my pictures were shitty and my writing was shitty too. But because there weren’t many bloggers out there who dealt with figurines and sarcastic humour, I managed to secure a critical mass of readership and comments which encouraged me to continue blogging. Blogging more generally brings about improvement in language and content, it’s as Gintoki says, "Practice makes perfect in the world of anime blogging".

Who is Gintoki? Sakata Gintoki is the protagonist of Gintama, the best ongoing anime series at the moment. It’s even better than Dennou Coil which I love dearly as well. The show only gets good at about episode 18, and beyond that it’s bloody legendary. But I digress. Back to the main topic.

Range Murata version of Miyuki and Natsumi.

As I was saying, the impetus to blog more stems from gaining popularity. Since Jimone talked about blogging in terms of economics (more on this later), I shall talk about anime blogging in terms of a MAN-MACHINE INTERFACE.

When people press a button, they look for feedback to show them they have pressed the button. That’s why buttons depress, make clicks and all that. When people blog, they hope for feedback as well. Feedback comes in the form of four major ways. Pageviews are the most basic. Everyone wants pageviews at first. Next is comments, which are the lifeblood of a blog and help to remind the blogger that those pageview numbers aren’t just bots trying to sell you viagra and Nigerian shares. 3rd is email, which is just an annoyingly private form of comment, and finally, the awesome Hyperlink. Hyperlinks show the blogger that other people read his blog and like it enough to refer to it. Also, it brings incoming traffic. Feedback tells the blogger that he is being appreciated and that will lead him to blog more.

Blogs die without feedback. And in this saturated blogosphere, it is getting harder and harder to obtain this vital bloglife energy as the pool of readers are not growing as fast as the number of blogs. And add to that the limited range of topics a blog can talk about, there’s a dearth of good content at the moment. Lots of people start a blog, write a bit of generic stuff, feel like no one is reading it, and then slink away defeated. And some of these people who give up are actually good writers with lots of content to contribute. But what can they do? Well, they can all enlist in Impz’s Army and be slaves growing his e-penis, but that’s not the only way to obtain the elixir of feedback.

People get into a routine and they like to stay in it. I myself have a routine when checking anime blogs. I go to Animenano, refresh, check the TITLE of every single post that I haven’t seen, click on those I find interesting (normally 1 out of 10-15) and then read it. I don’t bookmark anybody’s blog, but rely on the aggregator. But I do tend to click more on those blogs I already know. It’s "brand loyalty" (whee I know econs too!). Why do I click on those blogs I know? It’s because of affordances.

Affordances are what a blog is able to do. By "able to do" I mean the type of content it has and the style of writing. There’s a difference between perceived affordances, which is what a user THINKS a blog is able to do and actual affordances, which is what the blog is able to do. For example, I click on JPmeyer’s Minaide Hazukashii every single time he has a new post, despite the fact that all he writes about is Hinano and yaoi stuff these days. That’s because I have perceived affordances of his blog being full of good anime academic writing. Normally, a disjunction between perceived affordances and the actual ones leads to anguish and MADNESS, such as when you think a teapot can shoot lasers but it can’t. But I still read JP’s blog. My point is, the force of habit is pretty strong in us. Rather than read a new blog which I know nothing about, I would much rather read a familiar blog. OK the above paragraph was quite a load of conjured-up crap, forgive me.

So how do we get familiar? Adding yourself to an aggregator is the best way. The other way is to be bloody good, as what Superrats has done. He burst onto the scene like a SILVER SURFER and defeated everyone like the HUMAN TORCH.

Ok I don’t feel like talking about MAN-MACHINE INTERFACE anymore because my points don’t make sense. Instead, let’s talk about 3 new (or at least new to me) anime blogs that most people here probably don’t read. Using these three as an example, I’ll point out why they are great and where they are able to improve themselves.

The problem with new blogs is that many of their post ideas are rehashes of older bloggers’ posts. This is mainly because there are very few topics to do editorials on, such is the limited scope and huge number of bloggers. Many a time, a new blogger writes an editorial, many veteran readers check it out, realise it’s the same old points again, and closes it. But there are also many new readers who would not have seen the old original posts and would like the new posts. Thus a new generation is born and the old dudes just get bitter and complain about why the new posts all suck. This cyclical phenomenon appears in almost everything you see, be it football, anime or music.

Scrumptious Anime Blog
The best way to put your blog on the radar of readers is to be a girl. Yah, it’s that simple. You want to be famous? Be a girl.

Scrumptious is written by three people, two of whom are girls. They are Usagijen and Seleria and one more guy whose name I don’t remember because he is male. If you are unluckily born with a Y chromosome, then there are three ways to solve this problem. 1, go to Thailand for a sex change. 2, recruit female bloggers. 3, pretend to be a girl (like Impz). Why are girl bloggers more popular? Because readers,who are mainly male (just look at the above poll), wish to view the opinions and analysis of anime from a female point of view. Females bring about a more emotionally sensitive way of blogging which is a refreshing change from the usual logical and structured male blogging. That’s why girls are popular.

OK I LIE. All the male readers just want an online girlfriend and they think reading a girl’s blog makes the chances of that happening very high.

Anyway, the main reason I have added Scrumptious to my mental list of "Blogs whOse Posts I Click On NO Matter whAt The tItle" (BOPICONOMATI), is because they have a unique selling point. Their posts on Ookiku Furikabutte and Kaze no Stigma are long, detailed, released at the pace of Japanese raws, and point out differences between the manga/novel and the anime. These are stuff no other blog has. Scrumptious thus has a monopoly on the two series.

Having a monopoly on a subject is one of the ways to get into readers’ BOPICONOMATI. But Scrumptious isn’t perfect of course, there are some parts which can be improved. The banner for one, is pretty damn gay. I understand that 2/3 of the writers are yaoi-loving fangirls but having a picture of some half naked guy who looks like Goku from Saiyuki eating semen and what appears to be testicles at a glance is pretty unappealing.

J1m0ne’s Blog
I saw this blog just now on Animenano. It seems that he, Jimone, has been blogging for six months now. Most of us get our hardcore seiyuu information from Hashihime, but Jimone’s blog has even more information that Hashihime’s. Don’t worry Hashihime, we’ll still read you because you’re a girl (see point above on why girl bloggers will always have pageviews). Jimone has posts of great content and are superbly researched. He talks mainly about seiyuus, which is a niche area still untapped because of the barriers of entry (WOW I KNOW ECONS) that is a lack of primary sources in English. To know a lot about seiyuus, one has to read seiyuu magazines, seiyuu blogs, official websites and other stuff which are all in Japanese.

Oh yeah he has a post which talks about anime blogging in the context of economics (A level micro econs), hence the constant references to economics in this post. The main highlight would be the really indepth seiyuu profiles, which cover not just the usual popular ones, but even less famous newbies like Kitamura Eri (Tatiana Wisla <3).

Jimone’s blog is frankly quite awesome and as Kurogane said "SHIT OMFG HE’S GOING TO PUT US ALL OUT OF BUSINESS, KILL HIM NOW!!" and Impz concurred, "I HAVE TO GET HIM TO JOIN ME NOW NOW NOW NOW!!!111"

I have two complaints though, both of which are major. He needs to get off blogspot right now. Blogspot’s comments system is horrendous and is a great turn-off to commenters. Many a time, I wanted to comment on a blogspot-hosted blog but gave up because of the extra steps needed to do so. The 2nd complaint is, he needs to get a "post teaser" plugin. Right now, his front page expands all his individual posts in their full glory. An erected penis is only good when you want to use it, at other times it’s a nuisance. In the same way, full posts should always be behind a "More" link, if not it’s really difficult to navigate.

Tenka Saiha
This blog does episode summaries like many others, just faster. I don’t ever read episode summaries because most people follow English sub releases and hence are too slow. By the time these guys finish up their reviews, I’ve watched that episode weeks ago and forgotten about it. I do read ep reviews if it appears on the aggregators about the same time I finish watching that episode. To attain this speed, one has to blog the raw or Chinese subbed version. Of course, content is just as important as timing. I watch and enjoy all the shows Tenka Saiha blogs, except Murder Princess.

This blog isn’t in the BOPICONOMATI, unlike the above two but serves as a good example of episodic blogging. Episodic blogging has only three factors which are important. Speed, quality of analysis and humour. Stuff like pictures, detail of summary are just secondary.

So, yeah, do check out these three blogs! I personally enjoy reading them. Btw, blogrolls are the blogging equivalent of shaking hands and ascertaining friendships.