Hello everyone,
Let's stop a bit the weekly anime coverage schedule (there is no hurry as the winter season is upon us) and let's talk about something different today, something very common in these holiday days for us anime bloggers and something that I'm quite wary to get involved with.
I'm talking about the popular phenomenon revolving around "group posting" or "thematic posting" that involves a group of bloggers deciding to post over a particular argument or following a particular theme on their own respective blogs.
This phenomenon is always active inside the community with small limited effects, but the real apocalypse arrives in the holiday seasons where pretty much the 80% of the bloggers will follow one or another "strain" of this concept.
While I am pretty much a newcomer to the animeblogging scene (only a bit more than 11 months old), I am a very old blog reader (5-6 years old).
I generally just ignored in the past all the various thematic posts that appeared around the net from time to time and focused on what I was searching for at the time, be it an editorial, some news or some episodic coverage of a particular series.
This year I decided to give it a more detailed look and analysis on this phenomenon as an observer without partecipating as a writer as you probably already noticed.
The first thing I noticed by following costantly Animenano in the last 3 weeks (excluding 2-3 days when I was away for work), was that the pages were FILLED literally with these kind of posts.
I was like "hey, there's a lot of content! I can't wait to see what they're actually writing for!" and started to read (and sometimes comment too) pretty much all the posts revolving these concepts!
Unfortunately the impression I have after reading these posts was really bad. Why? I found myself reading "low-quality" posts compared to the normal quality I was used to read in these blogs.
Yes, in order to keep the same pace of the other blogs, my fellow bloggers were pushing up posts after posts without actually giving much care to the quality of what was written in it.
I started to wonder why all this was happening without finding any logical reason. I also noticed another important problem in pretty much all the followers and writers of these thematic posts. They were lacking consistency!
Let's try to pick up and talk about the "12 days of christmas" that is a quite nice concept (developed in the past by a blog now dead) revolving around posting once per day till christmas about something important anime-related that happened to you.
The first inconsistency I saw was that some bloggers were following the "12 to 1 countdown approach" and others the "1 to 12 approach" and even after a bit of search I was unable to understand which was the "correct way to do it".
Then we come with the time-zone issues, I started to see together contiguous posting (watching "day 2" and "day 3" right one after another) due to difference in time zone between one blogger and another.
Yep, the real problem with this first concept was that it was lacking an organizer managing all the partecipating blogs (and maybe giving an organized summary of all the posts grouped by blog) and some strict rules to follow at least for the most basic stuff like "numbering"!
Another important "thematic posting" that was quite followed in these holidays was the Reverse Thieves's Secret Santa project that is another quite nice concept revolving around bloggers "suggesting" to other bloggers three series to review and receiving three series as well to review.
This is a nice way to force yourself to watch another anime series you just skipped over in the past and provide something "different" to your readers compared to what they're used to see in your blog.
This project was really managed a lot better than the other one, with their main website giving out informations and at the end even some summary about the results of the project.
Still, some problems arised in this version as well. "Forcing" a blogger to write a review about something he just skipped out in the past turned out (for most cases with some notable exception) in low quality reviews filled with either hardcore bashing or plain apathy over the series.
I am left now with some level of sadness over the results of this analysis and with many questions and ideas running around my head on how to improve it.
I am sure this "thematic post" phenomenon is a great way to create some community feeling between blogs and improve the relations between bloggers, but at the same time I don't think these two examples I lived in these days were managed in the best way.
What do you think about these events that happens around the anime blogosphere? Do you partecipate already or plan to partecipate in the future?
Do you have any great idea on how to better organize these events?
See you soon,
feal87