UlasanAnime.com – In the grand beginning, God acted alone.
The internet, the blog, and you. How do you connect with your readership’s emotions? How do you find their vulnerabilities? Do you dazzle with brilliance or baffle with nonsense? Do you surprise, educate, or entertain? Do you brighten their lives and become “the link” people share at work or school? How do you build a connection with them? How do you create traction?
In simpler times, when the world was less crowded, there was ample space for innovation. Take anime blogs as an example. Jascii’s review and preview site served a crucial purpose. It was convenient because he would watch the raw episodes anyway, providing a valuable first look for many in the internet fan community to get a grasp of what was coming.
However, Jascii’s site was quite basic, lacking the elaborate features of many blogs today. It is now defunct, frozen in time. To its credit, it was one of the first blogs to gain significant traction by repurposing existing content. Given that the internet’s anime fandom is still largely fan-driven, emulating what Newtype USA did went a long way, especially before Newtype USA filled a rather large niche.
And NT-USA did fill a niche to a degree. The problem, for the most part, was that its marketing felt like marketing. It reeked of low-grade, bastardized Japanese marketing for the vast US market. Not to mention that it wasn’t an interactive forum like a blog can be; there wasn’t much of a community built through the publication. There was a lot of grasping for attention, but not much traction. In reality, internet fandom, like any subcultural following, gets its news directly from other fans online. NT-USA lacks the correct context; it’s like grasping at straws in an aquarium.
The flashy, pictorial editorial is a very obvious form of grasping, so to speak. It doesn’t take long before we arrive at today’s situation: a vast ocean of anime bloggers who communicate as much through their captured images as through what little (or a great deal) they have to say. If you’re reading one of these blogs, you’re likely interested either as a potential audience or as someone who has seen the material and wants to hear the bloggers’ opinions. Of course, framing is very important, and these blogs frame both the captured images and the episodes we watch within the bloggers’ respective contexts.
But once you start doing that, you’re left with very little room for innovation. Recall Jascii’s blog—that was largely innovation (granted, it was an obvious idea). Now, all we can do is differentiate by the shows we blog about, the appearance of our sites, and how we frame each episode we cover. To me, that’s just uninspiring. For instance, like framing pictures, you can go to a store, look at various frames, and pick some to see if your painting looks better in any of them. This analogy holds true, at least, with various perspectives and various shows. If I want a “Frame-Hayama” perspective, I can imagine how he would frame a show like The Reptilian Brain. That is to say, the only times I get excited about reading that kind of blog are when I can’t imagine how the framing would work with the subject matter. This happens fairly often, approximately only when each new season begins.
How else can we bloggers innovate? If you blogged or read blogs in their early years (around 2002?), you’d find that many blogs were simply soapboxes. I personally have a slight aversion to them because informativeness is a virtue. Or at least, the work bloggers put in should be somewhat constructive. A LJ-style rant doesn’t go very far, no matter what you’re blogging about, unless it’s incredibly funny (and 90% of the time, people are laughing at the writer).
Well, I suppose I should clarify that I dislike pure soapboxes. On the other hand, I do appreciate editorials that have a strong point and provoke thought. I also enjoy editorials that simply tackle lateral/meta questions (The Harem Fallout) or latent yet interesting questions (though they can become too academic very quickly). For example: the genre and medium divide in anime—defining what it is. Another topic I like is the marketing perspective of cultural commoditization concerning anime and manga franchises. One rather cool thing is that there’s an increasing amount of academic work published on these topics. My issue is that most of it still draws from academic contexts that I simply don’t possess. I’m no pop-cultural anthropologist; it’s not complete gibberish, but I find myself unfamiliar with some of the ideas and constructs/frameworks that are referenced. But a brainy anime blog, eh. Who’s interested in that?
Perhaps that’s why I still read Heisei Democracy. Not to say that porn doesn’t have traction—it gropes and sucks in all sorts of nasty ways. The problem with that is it becomes somewhat lame and quite short-sighted. But yes, this brings us to the next innovative paradigm: content. I’m sold by content. It’s what keeps me reading Penny-Arcade. It’s what I pay for when I buy gyuudon from Yoshinoya. Indeed, it’s not just mere ranting or capping, but actually saying something interesting, too.
You might also be interested in : The Harem’s Aftermath
What do you do once you’ve grasped what you’ve gained traction?
