(and here I thought I’d retired my meta category. Ah well.)
Owen S, an animeblogger who I’d never have heard of if not for Author’s link, writes of the equally new to me Anime Blogging Collective:
With the original 2 bloggers (on retrospective, a perfect synergy of an editorial and an episode summary blog) having now snowballed to its current 34, everything seemed well and good; unfortunately, a recent deconstruction of our latest joint blogging efforts have shown to possess a bias towards abstract ideas, with the concern that we’re just not connecting with the everyday otaku who reads anime blogs.
I think this is more a function of the fact that out here in the long tail of the web, there is no single -sphere for a given topic, but probably many micro-spheres. When I refer to the Otakusphere, I am really thinking of.. well, the folks on my blogroll, to be honest. Owen meanwhile has an entire collective of 30+ blogs that also seem to exist in a micro-sphere of their own. Ultimately, for any niche-sphere to grow, the micro-spheres will have to merge, usually under the aegis of one or two uber bloggers who do nothing else but collect links and have time enough to link prodigiously. A good marker that this is occurring is when most blogs in the niche start bearing unwieldy blogrolls.
To be honest, I think I value the more close-knit community of my own micro-sphere more than I do the traffic. So I’m content with not being on everyone’s blogroll; the people who stumble across this corner of the Otakusphere tend to stick around, and forgive me for not really blogging about anime enough. However, I am glad to know about Owen’s ABC project, and will definitely be keeping an eye on it. Who knows. I might actually be forced to expand my horizon a bit.
I always like to find out what other people think about anime, so I think it’s an extension of that reasoning as to while I’m in the Anime Blogging Collective, and why I feel like I’m sorta starting to have an unwieldy blogroll with different people talking about different things. Expanding horizons can be fun, but I’m sure you already knew that.
Surprisingly, Haibane Renmei was one of the anime that I’ve watched that has expanded my horizons in terms of what I watch today. :3
of course, horizons can be expanded so far that you dont have time to meaningfully explore within them. There is a balance. In the political blogsphere I have a pretty wide horizon, so for the otakusphere I am trying to avoid that and focus only on a few blogs, and let those blogs be my “filter”. I know I am missing out on a lot but that’s inevitable.