Reading anime blogs

I’ve been a religious RSS user for a long time, and Google Reader in recent years (sync between my phone and my work/home computers is great). My strategy is that I subscribed to the major aggregation feeds (AnimeNano and such) for a long time, and as I came across blogs/posts I liked, I used the star feature so that I’d remember where I found it. More recently when things got a bit crazy and I got too busy to properly skim through all the aggregation feeds every day, I just went through and picked out all the blogs where I had starred posts and subscribed directly to their feeds (I’m subscribed to a little of 40 blogs at the moment). Then I got rid of the aggregators completely. I figure that between that and Twitter, I should be able to find almost everything interesting without getting so many duplicates and “useless” (to me) posts. Eventually, I may bring the aggregators back just to see if there’s anything new, and so refresh my blog lineup that way. I also peruse blog comments regularly and look out for anything interesting that way.

So yeah, if it weren’t for RSS, I really don’t think I would follow any blogs religiously, because I’m far too forgetful/lazy. But this little “system” seems to work very well for me. :)

The only editorial blog that I actually read is yours. I guess I can relate with you more and the posts are almost always interesting to me. Especially the philosophical posts or the reviews. You also seem to put yourself into this blog more than others and I like how you interact with just about every comment that I have seen here. To me that’s a sign of a good blogger. The other blog I read is RandomC which satisfies just about all of my episodic needs with nice screen caps, summary, reviews, and comments. So shockingly, I only read two anime blogs.

Even though I’d like to add more, I cannot find something that appeals to me. Like with the blogs you listed, I’ll end up skim reading and not caring much about the content (no offense to the bloggers, it’s just me). Granted I did not give it a close look, my initial impression still matters for deciding what blog I give attention to. So, to list the process that I go through in choosing a blog:

Step 1. Did someone I respect link to it? What’s the goal of the blog? How is it different from the others and how will it benefit me? Laughter? Insight? Cool pictures? Good anime recommendations? That’s the kind of thing I’ll look for.

2. Does it meet my interests? Is it rational? Does the person have similar taste in anime? Are the posts informative or is it shallow and opinionated? If not informative, is it fun to read?

3. If I read two or three good posts, I’ll subscribe. Good blog design and respectful bloggers are always a plus.

Basically I want a blog that will provide something different than what other bloggers provide. If that can’t be achieved, I at least want the “best” of that category. I do not need 10 RandomC clones or 100 AnimeYume clones to subscribe to when I can stick to the best and not miss out on anything. I can make exceptions for blogs that meet a specific purpose of mine. Perhaps RandomC will not cover Code Geass so I will subscribe to a blog that does. Since my time and resources are valuable, I like minimizing my RSS feeds (and just about everything else in my life) to simply what I need or what “best meets my wants”. If you didn’t notice, I am a supporter of minimalism.

Now I don’t recall what originally drew me to your blog. I think someone linked here from a post or in a comment. My initial impression was great as the first post I read was enough to peak my interests. Unlike other sites, I did not need to browse each post and page to make sure it offered anything interesting. I just knew that this was the type of quality I’d want to subscribe to. I also tend not to comment much, due in part to my laziness and also to the fact that I feel like I am spamming if I have nothing substantial to add. Something like “Great post, I agree with you here and blah blah blah” doesn’t cut it for me.

I used to look through Anime Nano back in 2009, but the problem is that most of the content isn’t directly related to Anime. This is a reason why I started to use a RSS reader (Times.app and eventually Socialite.app which had RSS and Google Reader support). After I got an iPad, I shifted everything to Google Reader so I don’t have to subscribe to every feed over again if I use a different computer.

The only real blogs I read and comment most frequently these days is this blog, Major Arcana, Anime Instrumentality Blog and Aloe Dream besides my own. The reason being is that I don’t really read episodic blogs (even though I do episodic bloging (not the traditional kind) along with my reviews and editorials). The reason its limited to those blogs because it has interesting content. I’m also primarily busy doing college work and programming stuff mostly for Melative (also for MyAnimeList, but not a lot), so my time read blog posts is very short and my Google Reader is often time left with a lot of entries unread.

Additionally, I link to blogs I subscribed to and blogs that link back to my blog.

>>>digitalboy from Fuzakenna! is the one exception – I simply find him to be one of the most unique bloggers I’ve come across.<<<

<333333333333

When I started blogging in early 2007, I'd created my blog because of my being a member of the Megatokyo Forums. Several of the members there ran anime blogs (omo, wah, TheBigN, and the now-defunct Shiro) and when I saw this, I copied them. In the beginning, those last three I named were the only ones I read. I also got my buddy from MTF, Roast-beefy-weefs, to start a blog, which he only ran for a short while and it was only ever read by the same group I've named above lol. For a huge portion of 2007, that was true for me as well, with OGT also having been a frequent commenter, though I strangely never started reading his blog.

Once I got into 2008, there was a better variety of commenters on my blog, but I still didn't read any of their sites. I do know that I got introduced to Danny Choo's site at the end of 07, back when it was still somewhat worthwhile, and I recall reading that a lot. I also checked out a couple of news sites, but irregularly. Back then I was really more of a forum junkie, so I guess it's not that surprising.

In early 2008, there was the first and only Anime Blogger Awards, and I had a look at many different blogs there, but I think the only one I started actively reading was The Animanachronism, as omo had promoted him for 'best newcomer' (a title I really wanted, because my head was that far up my ass.) Oh, and I forgot to mention it, but somewhere along the line, I was also reading Martin's blog, which is now called Mono no Aware, but back then was called The End of the World. He'd shut down the latter blog, though, somewhere in 2008 I think, and it took me until 2010 to realize that Mono no Aware existed lol.

Also, I hadn't remembered it this way, but I'm looking through some stuff, and I think I started reading Baka-Raptor because of the ABA and his nominations as the funniest blog. He started commenting on my site in may of 08, and was probably the first non-MTF blogger that I actually read all the time (I'm pretty sure I haven't missed a single post in over 2 years, and I've read his backlog!)

Also in May, when one post I did got way more hits and comments than usual, I realized that my blog had somehow finally gotten onto one of the anime blog aggregators that I'd signed up for way back, and my sudden increase in commenter variety introduced me to some new sites. One of the first was Yukan Blog, a team blog who happened to be accepting new members when I found them. Now, I'd never seen a team blog before, and I assumed that they were meant for doing collaborations and such. I signed up to blog for them, only to realize how wrong I was and regret the decision because almost every other writer on the site (and especially it's leader, blissmo), were terrible or uninteresting, and I couldn't actually sit through any of their posts. So I only ever did a little bit for the site before fading back, just in time to watch the site fall to pieces.

When I made a post called "The Generation Gap OR '91 Reasons I'm Too Old For This and Too Young For That", apparently I suddenly started getting read by several of the sphere's intellectual bloggers, although I had no idea at the time. Particularly, I had otou-san, Pontifus, and lelangir comment, all of whom I'd much later come to know and love. (by the way, I'm writing this by going through my history of comments, and I just found one from August 08 where I said how I was thinking of opening a review site called Fuzakenna. I just thought it was interesting because that was like 8 months before I did so.)

In this late 08 period, there were the occasional blogs that came and went, by bloggers who were promising for a month or so and then disappeared, sadly. I also apparently discovered ETERNAL's blog then. Anyway, the most important turning point came in October of 2008 when I got my first ghostlightning comment. And then I got a couple more. What I didn't know was that ghostlightning had just opened his blog and literally sat on animenano commenting on everything he could to try and get people to read his blog. But I did read it, and almost immediately chased GL down and asked him to do a collaboration with me. The collab didn't work out, even though we did a fair amount of planning, but that was still the start of a beautiful, gay-ass friendship that's still holding strong today.

In that same month, ghostlightning and Baka-Raptor became members of the up-and-coming, much-hyped team blogging project Oi, Hayaku!, which I was immediately a fan of. So when they started looking for a couple more members, I fought to get in, and did. This was where I made my breakthrough into the realization that, holy shit, there is an 'anime blogosphere.' It was only going up from there. Through OH! I also met Lolikitsune, who, along with Ghostlightning, helped to completely change the way I did things in late 08, which brought me onto the path of being a better writer.

Anyway, that's the whole part where everything is specific, and the rest is a mess. In early 09 I started whoring out on Anime Nano and got to know most of the blogosphere and started reading a few blogs, most of which I didn't stick to. Over the whole course of 09, I finally started getting new readers and, towards the end of the year, mostly because of my 100 Characters series, I built up the reader base I have now. Most of the blogs that I started reading in this time were the ones by bloggers who were now reading me regularly.

However, over time, I gradually stopped caring about other anime bloggers. I stopped reading anyone on nano as well as everyone I wasn't friends with or greatly enjoyed. I just don't have the energy anymore to deal with bloggers that I disagree with, and so, my list of blogs has gone down significantly. This core of blogs that I still have in my reader is as follows:

2-D Teleidoscope (started reading my in late 09), Baka-Raptor, Ogiue Maniax (learned about through other bloggers), Pontif.us, Mono no Aware, We Remember Love, and Mainichi Anime Yume <3. Those aren't all of what I read, but the other ones I either don't read most of their posts or they haven't been posting for quite a while now. 2DT, Baka-Raptor, and WRL are the only three that I read all the time, and 2DT and BR are the only ones where I go back to check up on comments.

You'd think it could be boring to have so little reading material, but I talk to those and many more people whom I don't read on Twitter all the time, and lately everyone and their grandma has been starting Tumblr blogs, so I read a number of those, plus I scope out some things from around the internet via what's shared with me on Google Reader Shared Items. So I at least fill out enough to satiate.

Sorry this comment is so insanely long, I sort of got on a roll and then said fuck it, let's go all the way lol.

I guess I’ve been in the culture of RSS user since 2004 or so, so I definitely stick to feeds… it’s easier to deal with imo; better organization and control over content. I like that you mention the social side of blogging (relations with other bloggers), because that is precisely what drives my habits in this sphere. Although there is no true separation between personality and content, the individuals are going to write what and how their perspective allows. The who/how of entries is just as important as the content itself, because it is social… we read who we like, we read what we like, and sometimes that overlaps.

Despite my cherry-picking about which posts to read, and my choice to read blogs based more on individual posts rather than following the blog itself, I still feel I have a good sense of the prominent bloggers and the overall opinion of each new anime series that passes through the crazy and wonderful thing known as the aniblogsphere.

I think cherry-picking outside a core set of blogs (favorites) is a great idea, as it offers a good spread of what’s going on. Within my own subscription list, I have two important categories “Superfav” and “The Stronghold.” Some might think they overlap, and they do, but really Superfav represents the blogs I’m personally connected to and want to read and Stronghold represents blogs I respect and believe have the ability to create strong content. (It doesn’t mean I read every post, but I star or tag certain posts to come back to them)

Outside of those two categories there are a boat-load of others categories, and I mostly avoid episodics and cherry-pick everything else that comes into the reader (which is a lot of content from 230 feeds)… there is also a good deal of variation in what bloggers write about (music, manga, editorials, art, seasonal, etc). I guess I have adjusted to breezing through updates and knowing what I want to read when it’s organized, but it still takes a bunch of time :\

My methods evolve over time, and have been this whole time… but I still think it ultimately comes down to simple reading of something we want to read either for social or info purposes, and growing social relations based on who we like to surround ourselves with.

Honestly, I search after I watch a show to see how people think about the overall quality of the show. I have your blog, TMSIDR’s two blogs, and Cartoon Leap that I check everyday (though I try and read 2DT’s when I remember to). I stick more towards forums for news updates mostly (or to provide news updates in the case of Haruhi). If I do venture onto a new blog, it’s mostly because of blogrolls and recommendations from other people.

I’ve “burned” a feed for my blog (only vaguely knowing what that even meant), but generally, when I read other people’s blogs, including yours, I just go to my “Anime Blogs” folder in my Bookmarks and click on your blog link. When I open the dashboard to my own Blogger blog, I have yours and other people’s blogs on my Google Reader feed(?), but usually I just click on the links in my Anime Blogs folder…

I must confess that I don’t read your Haruhi posts, as you know I’m not a big fan of that series ;) – but I usually read most everything else that you post, unless it appears to be on a series that I know I’m not interested in or (conversely) that I might become interested in – and then I don’t want to spoil it for myself! =D

I discover other blogs through comments much of the time. I discovered about 4-5 females blogging Hakuouki (possibly we were the only ones in the Western Hemisphere watching this series – I’m not sure ;)) through reading their comments on each other’s Hakuouki blog posts, and now I try to remember to check their blogs every few days or so.

One blog I found this way that I want to recommend is Tenchi’s Thoughts. Christina is a really funny writer. Her Uraboku posts always have me laughing (much as the series often does, I’m afraid – unintentionally)…

GoogleReader is my friend :) Otherwise I’d totally forget which blogs I’d want to read! I also use a Firefox plugin called “ReaditLater” which allows me to keep track of posts I want to come back to later to comment or read more thoroughly.

I am kindof the opposite of you as far as anime blogging goes. I explored a little to see what was out there before creating my own blog, because I didn’t really find anyone doing the kind of writing I was interested in. But then I wanted to feel like I was a part of the greater anime blogosphere conversation, so I started following some of the more popular blogs regardless of content. I just added a bunch of blogs to my GoogleReader and if I didn’t like three or more posts in a row, I unsubscribed. It was kindof a process of elimination … that sounds kindof harsh, actually! But it means that I now read posts by bloggers that interest me, either because of their topics or their writing style.

I also find it really useful to check the blogrolls of bloggers that I like. If I like and respect a blogger’s writing, they generally have good taste! :) I’ve found lots of new blogs that way.

I personally use Google Reader loaded up with every single blog that participated in a certain event back in April. I pretty much skim all of the posts there and comment if I really feel like it. I don’t really have any particular favorites I want to read since I’m usually just going off the title of posts or recommendations on Twitter. Pretty boring stuff I’m sure.

I use a feed reader to get notified of new posts, then visit them after that.

I just scour through blogrolls, visiting plenty of blogs like some blogosphere globetrotter until I find something interesting to read, then I start reading them. Or when people comment on my blog and they have a site, I like to make friends, so I start reading theirs and provide feedback as well.

Darn, I wished my friends were more open to blogging. I don’t know anyone who blogs about anime, most of their blogs just blog about emo stuff. Sometimes, I think I should plan meetups with some of the bloggers out there, just for fun.

Besides this blog, there are only a handful I follow and even fewer on which I post comments,
because a lot of bloggers don’t bother responding to comments. I do appreciate how you, along with 2DT and others like ghostlightning, some of the THAT Anime Blog collective, and Scamp (to name a few) take the time to carry out an exchange with your readers rather than letting your post stand like a textual monolith in the blogosphere.

I don’t use RSS (eh, what?) or any other aggregating technology, so I rely on old-fashioned bookmarks in Safari. Yeah, I’m a bit behind the times. =)

I follow episodic blogs only for series I currently watch, but I much prefer blogs like yours that talk about anime and the fandom in general. I also like some introspection, wit, and humor in a blog, as well as minimal amounts of self-absorption and pretentiousness. For example, I notice you – and other bloggers I like – almost always end a post with an invitation to the readers in the form of a question to get us thinking and responding. I enjoy getting a sense of bloggers’ personalities, but very often the posts become more about *them* than about anime or whatever they’re blogging about, and that just makes me grumpy.

Another type of blogposts (rather than blogs) I enjoy are anime convention reports, especially for big ones like AX. I often miss several interesting panels or events, and reading reports specifically about these panels helps fill me in. It’s no substitute for actually being there, but at least I didn’t have to wait an hour in line to get into the room! I recently read a blogpost with a transcript of a panel on the future of manga and digital media at San Diego Comic Con that was very informative, for example.

Via Anime Nano and the Aniblog Tournament, I’ve tried to be more active over the past few months in reading (and commenting on) other people’s blogs. I’m not necessarily looking for ones that mirror my own interests, but just hunting for well-written and entertaining ones that I could learn a thing or two from, or which make me rethink my own fandom in a different way. And I’m always looking for original blogs that aren’t just a carbon copy of what’s already out there.

I tend to shy away from episodic blogs or those that focus solely on current series — which has probably kept me segregated from a the most active bulk of the anime blogosphere — and figure and merchandise-focused blogs. I like blogs with a more personal bent, ones where the author gives readers a piece of themselves, telling us what they like and why. I also like blogs featuring smart editorials and cultural discussion. I’d like to find more blogs that mix an honest love of anime with other subjects. For example I’d like to write about music and other topics more on my own blog, but I’m almost wondering if doing so would get me booted from Anime Nano, which is responsible for at least 80% of the hits and readers that I ever get.

I daresay that the Aniblog tourney did bring me a lot of new names to check out and with that, I’ve been following the sites that have offered a lot of editorial content moreso than episodics since I’m so behind on anime these days that episodics aren’t too relevant by the time I get around to checking some of the stuff out. So usually, twice a day, I’ll trawl ANano to see if there’s anything interesting to read and comment on and I’ll especially do it if my eyes fall upon some music-focused post. We could always use more of those around the ‘sphere.

Google Reader has been pretty invaluable to me. Before then I had to spend ages clicking on every link in my blogroll to stay current, not to mention keeping an eye out for new faces on AnimeNano.

I’m pretty bad at leaving regular comments. :) But if you’re on my Reader feed, I’m going to read everything you write, so I figure it’s a trade of sorts. Naturally you’re on there, too.

There’s just so many anime blogs (some good, some not so much) That I’m glad I use RSS.

But before I subscribe I usually read a few articles to see if it’s a site I should follow for updates. And since I’m always on the lookout for great articles to post (yes, I’m another blogger. Teh groan :D), it helps to have an easy way to see the articles.

the blogs in my blog roll are the one that I’m interested in. I don’t do exchange link. I check them out daily but usually ignore the episodic review because I’m way behind the episodes and does not want a spoiler. The only blog that I check out daily is Glo and won’t miss an update from Baka Raptor either.

I read your blog man haha, cuz you put cool anime pics XD!