In one of my many trawls across the blogsphere, I found myself flicking back through old posts on Daijoubu to read mildly humorous posts involving dangos until I came across this smart idea. Take the latest 20 posts on Animenano and read them all, giving you a quick insight into the anime world. Normally when I go on Nano, I might click on one or two links per every 5 pages. This is mainly because I’ve subscribed to the good ones in google reader but also there’s that often spoken grievance that there’s so many poor blogs on Nano. How many of you say that but never read a huge proportion of these blogs? So lets give them all a chance for a change. At least this time there’s no Sankaku clogging up the feed.
So first up is NyanNyan blogging Black Jack episode 21. Err…there’s not much to say when someone is blogging an older series that you’ve never seen. It’s a Tezuka manga adaptation and judging by the screencaps it’s actually pretty new. I hate to admit it but I’ve never seen or read any of the God of Mangas’works. Can’t say much about her blogging of the episode though. 2 paragraphs of rehashing what we’ve seen in the episode followed by on sentence of her own thoughts on the episode. Still, it can’t be easy to go through blogging something like that through 21 episodes so props to her anyway.
Next up, Alafista. Merchandise photoshoot blogs bore me and this is just another one of those posts that says ‘hey, I saw this. Aint it cool?’. Actually to be fair, those Nanoha PSP cases do look pretty cool, even though I’ve never seen the show and don’t have any real intention of ever watching it. Mahou Shojo rubs me the wrong way.
Omohide is reviewing Eve no Jikan? Whoo~ I love that show. (off topic rant: Why use the Japanese name when there’s the perfectly good and more logical Time of Eve? It’s like people who call it Higashi no Eden when Eden of the East works far better. And don’t get my started on the Japanese name of Haruhi, urgh). It’s a straight-up review and he certainly likes the show. His only problem was it was too short? They did hint at a second season at the end. I dunno but straight up reviews on blogs bug me. Why not just post your review on MAL? It gets a bigger audience.
Shadows of Eternity has a post title that I couldn’t work out what it contained from the title. My guess was a review of the winter anime in a positive light? Nope, it’s someone talking about their bandwidth being poor on a beach with a Haruhi novel. It’s nothing more than a diary entry. Not exactly the most exciting, informative, funny or useful post in the world shall we say.
The guy from the Banzai effect is visitng a cafe and he’s armed with plenty of figurenes and a camera! Let’s just say I’m looking forward to the OEG’s visit to this site.
Nendo snow adventure…it’s kinda funny to note that this site looks very similar to Banzai effect. It even has that same effect on my screen, making it jerk as it’s weighed down by adverts and other stuff on the sidebar. Maybe they’re there to distract the reader from the total lack of readable content?
Hyper Parfait is one of the 5482305 blogs out there reviewing the second episode of Durarara. Actually she’s done a pretty fine job of it too, although a bit tl;dr. I normally associate Hyper Parfait with fangirling but that’s mainly because I see her Hetalia posts. It appears she’s read the books already but she refrained from any spoilers but what made her post stand out was the thoughts on the suicide in the episode. I’m always wary of taking what anime says about Japan as facts but suicide is a pretty serious problem there. She points out that an awful lot of old people commit suicide too, which kinda surprised me, but it’s youths that get media attention. Pretty good post all round.
Animemiz has managed to round up a group of people on twitter to give advice on how to review manga. Short, simple and smart, quite a good post actually. I like the person who reccomends using metaphors because that makes the review stand out. Omohide probably should’ve done that. His review did lack a bit of life and didn’t really say anything that wasn’t said before.
Random Curiousity is reviewing FMA:B episode 40. ARGH, SPOILERS!!! I never end up reading RandomC because they always review the episode long before I get the chance to watch it. All I can say is I saw the phrase ‘much better than last weeks, very compelling’. Looking forward to watching it and then reading Sea Slugs or Unmei Kaihen instead because their posts appear after I’ve watched it.
Metanorn with characters songs? Yawn, oh wait, it’s Hetalia! That means it has funny lyrics! Oh wait, no translation of the lyrics…
Star Crossed is blogging Letter Bee. I dropped this a few episodes back but does it get any better? Nope, it’s still in corny, badly written fillers. Psgels doesn’t seem too unhappy with the series but his review tells me all I needed to know. Letter Bee can remain in that dropped bin.
Not Cliche has some intersting stats on Modern Warfare 2 and its advertisement budget. The thing is, what the hell is this doing on Nano? Nothing to do with anime whatsoever. Stupid post~
Ah Fuzakenna, the blog that everyone seems to like. We’ve got another one hopping on the Durarara episode 2 bandwagon. He spends the entire post comparing it to Boogiepop, which was lost on me who hasn’t watched that yet. It’s mildly interesting, talking about the psychology of myths and stuff, but reads at times like that cursed academic journal style that too many bloggers fall into. Next thing you know his post titles will include the word ‘musings’ and uses the phrase ‘post-modernism’ and actually means it.
Lustrous Realm appears to be yet another person smitten by the beauty of Mikoto. Apparently the Railgun opening is awesome. I thought it was crap but I also think Chobits is one of the best anime of all time so what do I know.
Metanorn again, this time with the Fairy Tail soundtrack. It’s just a list of the songs and a download link. Cool for Fairy Tail fans I suppose.
Sunny side up gives us a barrage of the latest manga chapters. Everything is centre aligned and therefore impossible to read without your head exploding so I’m not trying.
The Null Set is offering a bunch of awards to anime, who I’m sure are all delighted to receive these awards. You can see the guy has clear favourites from the season. Erin, Railgun and Cross Game appear to be his favourites. Actually Cross Game kept coming second, which sums up Cross Game some what. Cross Game would get the award for ‘show that never exells in anything but does well in everything’.
Project Genesis. Never heard of it but they’re posting something related to Pokemon and that’s always cool. Someone decided to sub over Pokemon with their own humorous subs. The opening is actually pretty darn funny bit the rest is a bit meh. Actually no, I laughed out loud at the ‘a green pokeball? That’s rare, everyone seems to prefer the standard red and white version. Which probably explains why nobody can catch the legendaries’. Ah Pokemon~
Notdotq is doing its usual business of satarizing the blogsphere. It actually starts of pretty funny with the ‘best of the year’ bit but then falls into name dropping. ‘Cuz referencing is funny! According to baka-raptor it isn’t. OH LOOK, I MENTIONED BAKA-RAPTOR! YOU READ HIS BLOG AND KNOW THE NAME, THEREFORE IT’S FUNNY!
Finally Zone Otaku, which looks exactly like Banzai Effect and all those other otaku blogs. Bring on the OEG OH LOOK, I MENTIONED THE OEG. YOU KNOW THAT BLOG AND THEREFORE THAT’S FUNNY!
Urgh…I actually started this post with the intention of proving that Nano wasn’t full of crap. I was here to say ‘hey look, there’s some really interesting stuff out there if you just click on the links for a change’. But I’ve reached the end of this post feeling totally burned out. Maybe I just picked the wrong day. Any other bloggers out there are invited to provide their own snapshots of nano to see if you pick a better day than me.
luffyluffy (384)
Humanity_Cat (147)
Shinmaru (129)
Janette (113)
blissfullynaive (106)
kiseki (104)
kadian1364 (93)
ExecutiveOtaku (81)
18 Comments
It really is a nice idea and I’ll probably pick it up too. Though, AniNano is indeed so full of crap… -.-
Referencing Baka-Raptor is only funny if you add a link.
@Eugen R.
I’m going to be optimistic and say I just picked it at a bad time or something. I wish you luck
@Baka-Raptor
Haven’t you heard? The audience for anime blogs is only other anime bloggers who already know all these names and therefore don’t need to be linked! Anyone who doesn’t get the instant reference to a random post on any blog needs to level up or stop reading anime blogs.
link added anyway~
P.S. though your attempt to mock my style with your Baka-Raptor-directed comment is cute, it’s ultimately not very helpful. See, some people want to have lots of readers, and they write for a general audience and sometimes amass large groups of followers. That’s your strategy, it would seem, and it’s the strategy of many in the ‘sphere.
But you can’t say that that’s my goal, and that I think I can reach it with my reference-laden posts. I know I can’t. And I’m not trying.
I have maybe 20 to 30 readers, most of whom have been reading me for over 3 years.
And when I don’t post for three or six months, those same people are still there reading any post I write the moment I decide to “come back.” That’s plenty for me. And I write in a way I think will best amuse those people. It’s my way of giving back to them.
No shit my strategy doesn’t rake in new readers
@Scamp
I sadly have to sign there. It’s very rare non-bloggers read anime blogs. Because of that, many ‘promotion’ problems begin their existence: if everyone has a blog, they’d rather promote it than somebody else’s, thus e.g. we get a bunch of Digg submissions with only one vote, of the submitter himself. Etcetera.
@Gargron
That’s an interesting idea, and it’s probably the reality. Maybe anime bloggers need to start offering something more rewarding to their readers than just an opinion.
@Gargron
Yeah, I really don’t like that. It goes against the entire reason I started blogging and the reason I continue blogging. I didn’t start writing to join this community, as much fun as it is and all. I’m blogging for people to start reading this blog out of some sort of fluke, following this, following links, posting comments and generally joining in anime fandom on the internet. It’s what the Cart Driver is about, people who never joined online discussion before suddenly leaping in to argue with those who’ve been around forever.
Mind you, getting fluke new readers is difficult when I’m currently not showing up on any google search beyond ‘the cart driver’…
@Sorrow-kun
If you keep reading this blog I’ll give you a cookie~
Seriously though, I’m not sure what else we can offer. Humour? Screencaps? I’ve got a top commenters widget which gives them their name in lights
That’s a pretty good list you read, actually. Usually whenever I click on a random link on Nano, I go to some shit news site.
If I did this, I’d get 19 Sankaku Complex posts and 1 Dannychoo post. It would be the day that Dannychoo registers for Nano. I’m just that unlucky.
That’s really interesting, what you did. I don’t use Nano too often because, similar to you, I usually browse through my yahoo feed reader. Anyway, I think it’s the same anywhere that bad stuffs outnumber good stuff
@fangzhao
Go for it! Honestly I think I might have caught Nano on a bad day. I’m actually tempted to do it again myself which is why I asked at the end for others to try this. Why suffer yourself when you can make others do it for you!
@Canne
Yahoo? Hisssss~ Google reader FTW!
Whoa~ This looks fun~ I wanna do it but hhhmm … I dunno when I’ll have the time to read that much.
(I like Anime Nano for the lack of Sankaku x_x those images are too dangerous x_x even at home ‘coz my momz might see. gah)
Anyway, I don’t care if DRRR!! is overblogged, I’m madly in love with it xD haha!
“although a bit tl;dr“
–> you mean the typos and the wrong grammar? Haha! *really lazy to recheck/proofread posts*
“She points out that an awful lot of old people commit suicide too, which kinda surprised me,“
–> surprised me as well, but it’s true. Forgot where I read it *lost the article link* but yeah, it’s the youth that gets the media attention.
Not a bad experiment. I intend to do it, but that doesn’t always happen.
I don’t consider one possibly interesting post per page all that bad considering the different interests. It would be candy and unicorns if every post rocked, but we all have different interests so I never expect to be interested by a lot of it, which doesn’t make it post awful, just not relevant to me. It takes 10 seconds to read the post titles? Doesn’t take long to check it. Find it faster to scan that than Google Reader to be honest, but I probably need to better organize my Google Reader and somehow get to it in fewer clicks.
Even though I collect figures, I don’t click any of the figure news posts because they tell me everything I need to know right there in the title and if it doesn’t register in my head, there’s three or four more with the same headline to reinforce the news. I guess since I don’t expect to read everything, nano sort of gives me the bold-text, keywords, snapshot of what’s airing and being released or talked about.
@Sapphire Pyro
Heck, even I’m blogging DRRR!! I’m hoping some of the others will lose heart when they discover the never-ending schedule of episodic blogging.
@super rats
The thing is people don’t click on links to posts that might actually be interesting. If I went by that page normally I wouldn’t have clicked on any of the links (I’ve read enough Durarara posts already). I was meant to prove that there are good blogs so long as you just read them but didn’t quite work out like that
@ Gargron, Scamp: So I have to dispute the statement that it’s rare that non-bloggers read anime blogs. I think you’re overestimating the size and attention of anime bloggers.
From what I’ve seen in google analytics, at any given time about 65–70% of visits to my site are new visitors and the other chunk being the “regulars”. Now those “regulars” in total make up about half the traffic. But at the same time, I’d argue that a significant percentage of those “regulars” are not anime bloggers. There’s no way for me to quantify that, but based on the population of anime bloggers and the total number of regular visits I get, it’s something I feel safe in assuming.
I don’t think there’s anything unique with my blog, so I’d imagine the numbers would be pretty similar for you (well, maybe not you Scamp, since the Cart Driver is newer and probably hasn’t picked up too much search traffic yet, but eventually I think you’ll land around there).
@RP
Yeah, back at Bokutachi most of the readers weren’t subscribers or bloggers and that’s the way I think it should be. That’s why I never write with the idea that it’s only bloggers who are reading the post. However Cart Driver isn’t getting any total newcomers at the moment. I’m just gonna have to write away and hope the hits start accumulating sooner rather than later
Interesting… those are the 20 “latest” posts on Anime Nano? I’m pretty sure lolikappa’s post was from January. But oh wellz, it gives you the chance to imitate us (there you go—satirizing other anime blogs!), and imitation is the highest form of praise.
You’re coming up in the world, Scamp.
Maybe some day you’ll be an autonomous life form. =DD
*psst* look at the post date. You only got the trackback now because I was doing some maintanence
OHLOLZ
luv ya bro