In order to adapt to increasing competition, one must find a unique niche to occupy
Recommended reading. Our own Celestia wonders how she should blog about H!P when our community has so many H!P blogs. It’s a good question and I think all H!P bloggers has a sense of stepping on each other’s toes at times, but again: a unique point of view will always have unique things to say. Certainly, Celestia has that. (Also, it’s not like H!P bloggers are as numerous as bloggers about, say, comic books or movies. It’s the difference between dozens of blogs covering the exact same topic and hundreds (if not thousands) of blogs doing the same.) It doesn’t come easy to everyone, but it’s a case of trying out different approaches and finding what makes you happy.
To be absolutely candid, I also think the main virtue in blogging is persistence. The attrition rate is so horrible, if you just stick to your blog and write in it regularly, you’ll almost definitely emerge with a solid audience over time, who’re in sync with your concerns and your stylistic quirks.
Moar Costume Hall of Shame would be nice, though.
Comment by Yoshimi — 2008/04/04 @ 7:43 pm
This is only semi-related, but it’s something I’ve been curious about for quite a while. Why the lapse in pingbacks for certain blogs? Sometimes, I’ll have a post (or two) up for days at a time and nobody will link to it here until the last minute. It used to be that when I posted something new, it got pinged back within 24 hours.
No idea where else I should’ve gone with this. Sorry!
Comment by celestia_414 — 2008/04/04 @ 7:55 pm
more blogs=more entries=takes longer to get new ones up?
I think that’s the formula.
sorry for the sarcasm. i do know what you mean though.
Comment by Yoshimi — 2008/04/04 @ 8:08 pm
I think this is more a matter of favoritism, which is something I sincerely don’t want to believe from International Wota, of all places. Every person “employed” here to ping back blogs seems to pick and choose which ones to specifically link to, which are likely based on their own preferences towards those blogs. At the moment, Wu-san is the only person here who even bothers with me anymore, which is incredibly disheartening when you take into account the fact that Ray used to primarily watch my blog.
Permit me to quote Ray himself here: “…it’s not like H!P bloggers are as numerous as bloggers about, say, comic books or movies. It’s the difference between dozens of blogs covering the exact same topic and hundreds (if not thousands) of blogs doing the same.)”. I would definitely understand the lack of pingbacks more if this wasn’t a feed dedicated to a primarily English-speaking community of fans of Japanese music groups. As it is, this isn’t, which is where my confusion stems.
Comment by celestia_414 — 2008/04/04 @ 8:19 pm
hmm. i guess people can choose what to write about, but i don’t think it’s favoritism to a particular blogger. I think it’s more people writing about entries that happen to catch their eye out of the flood of them that are coming in. I know that I personally don’t really feel qualified to write up stuff on topics that i know nothing about though, so that limits the kind of stuff i choose to post.
I’m sorry that you feel that way though. Actually, I’m pretty new here, so I’m probably not the best person to be addressing this anyway. Maybe someone else can help clarify?
Comment by Ray — 2008/04/04 @ 8:19 pm
The way things work at Intl Wota is that everyone is free to cover whatever they wish that fits the site’s purview – there are no quotas, there is no set list of who does what. While we cover a good deal of posts, by no means is it ever all the posts we feel should be covered. No blogs have all of their posts covered (nor should they, I’d argue), and a lot of it is judgment calls, individual taste, and making time to do this.
If you’re getting covered by me in particular, there’s a good chance that there’ll be a good deal of lag time between your posting and my IW entry, because I want to give the other contributors a chance to get at it first. Also there are some blogs I just don’t cover because they’ve become other people’s unofficial beats and I tend not to think of them.
So basically, there’s three things in mind: Is somebody on Intl Wota interested in your writing? Do they have something interesting to say about it? And do they have the time to write about your blog? We try hard to have as many blogs we like pass all three criteria, but it’s not always going to happen.
Comment by pengie — 2008/04/04 @ 8:41 pm
Just personally speaking, Yoshimi, I haven’t seen favoritism from a single member of IW. I pick and choose what I cover because we have multiple people on staff willing to cover H!P, and only a few who are willing to sit down and look through (or look FOR, in my case) general jpop blogs. It’s a picking and choosing of topics, yes, but not who we’re going to cover. If I was a more hardcore H!P fan, I’m sure I’d ping your blog, but I just personally don’t get excited about it, so I stick to the other topics.
wu-san picks up what some of us are too busy to get to. We all have school, work, and other things to do–it’s unfortunate, but sometimes blog entries will just get missed. wu picks up for that, sometimes, for which I’m incredibly grateful.
Comment by Yoshimi — 2008/04/04 @ 8:41 pm
@ Ray: I perfectly understand the third point.
The second doesn’t make very much sense to me. It doesn’t matter if the person pinging the entry back doesn’t have something “interesting” to say about it — as long as it has a topic that may interest the readership, they can just write a summary akin to “[Blogger's Name] details [Artist]’s new album [Album Title], finding it to be [Blah Blah Blah]” (which I have seen before). It seems as if you’re saying what one person wants to hear about has priority over what the majority might want to hear about. Forgive me if I’m not getting the point/blowing things out of proportion.
The explanation above is applicable to the first point.
Comment by Ray — 2008/04/04 @ 8:57 pm
Yoshimi, you wrote: “Every person “employed” here to ping back blogs seems to pick and choose which ones to specifically link to, which are likely based on their own preferences towards those blogs.”
Yes. Most definitely. When we started Intl Wota, I tried to have a weekly quota for all our contributors and it didn’t work out. This isn’t only because we all have busy lives outside of the internet, but also because most of us are very active bloggers and I always stress that individual blogs should take priority over Intl Wota. As a result, I switched to a carte blanche policy, which has worked for us much more often than not. If I started telling my contributors that they MUST cover one blog or another, I don’t think I’d have any regular contributors left (and rightfully so, it’s not like they owe me anything). And even given our carte blanche approach, there’s still a chance for burnout or just needing to take a break for a while.
No one is actually “employed” on Intl Wota, of course, so we’re all doing this out of our own personal interests – and yes, that means writing what we want about. If that’s favoritism, then I’m all for it and actively encourage it; after all, this favoritism is covering dozens upon dozens of blogs each week and has a pretty wide reach. Taking it from another angle, indiscriminate inclusivity – that is, a sense of objectivity that seeks to cover everything within our reach – would suck and not fit what Intl Wota was intended for. We expect our contributors to be thoughtful and critically discriminating readers who will write their entries accordingly. As a result, when you read Intl Wota, there’s a better than average chance that what we write up will indeed be of interest to readers.
Also, preferences work different ways. pengie, for example, doesn’t have a beat per se but has taken on seeking out new blogs. I go out of my way to try to cover blogs in genres that I feel aren’t getting enough attention here. I don’t like jrock, but it needs to be covered and there’s good bloggers writing about it. I wouldn’t call that favoritism, exactly.
As I’ve been writing this, I see you responded to my first post, asking why don’t we just do quick write-ups on everything that we consider may be of interest to readers. To quote you again, “It seems as if you’re saying what one person wants to hear about has priority over what the majority might want to hear about.” Well, again, we try to cover what we can, and I don’t think it’s useful to second-guess what a nebulous majority would be interested in rather than each contributor following her individual bliss.
The best answer, of course, is to have more of that majority you mention becoming involved actively in Intl Wota and what it provides. If you’re reading this and wanna pimp your favorite reads, drop me an e-mail and we’ll set you up! Seriously. We can always use more help and more points of view.
Comment by pengie — 2008/04/04 @ 9:03 pm
That’s an excellent wall of text you’ve got there, Ray. 8D
Seriously though, I think you just about summed that up for everyone (including myself). If we’re routinely missing things that deserve to be covered, and if someone reading this knows about them, and wants to do the writeups, join the staff! But please, no more H!P fans, I’m getting so sick and ti… kidding. XD
/goes off to listen to “Namida no Iro” for the 100th time
Comment by craig — 2008/04/04 @ 9:09 pm
I think of pinging as an automated thing… I’d rather not think that we ping. More I’d rather think we do something more human, the expression for which I can’t think of right now.
Comment by Yoshimi — 2008/04/04 @ 9:10 pm
Thank you for giving me a decent answer.
…oh, and one frivolous query: My blog’s name is ★ ☆ yossha yossha YOSSHA! ☆ ★. I understand that this is ridiculously long (I honestly don’t know what the hell I was thinking), but I’d prefer if the two lowercase “yossha”s were included in the link to it under the “Intl. Wota Friends” list. In the event that this would also make it inordinately longer than the other links (I’m pretty much guessing it would), maybe trim it down to one lowercase “yossha”. It…kind of bothers me to see the lone one right there.
Finally, I apologize if I’ve irritated anybody, and that my point in mentioning this at all was not because of “competition” or anything of the such (both regarding my original question and the thing about my ridiculous long blog title). I didn’t know where else to take this to, since I’ve never seen a place specifically for concerns/complaints about Intl. Wota. So…
Comment by pengie — 2008/04/04 @ 9:14 pm
Complaints? What complaints? We’re perfect! 8D (actually, an e-mail to Ray would probably do nicely.)
I fixed the link–I think we had to keep it short, initially, because the theme had a dropdown link list that couldn’t go over a certain number of characters.
Comment by broomhead — 2008/04/04 @ 9:59 pm
Replies came in fast and there are a lot of things to cover here. Ray’s last comment covered a great deal. I’ll end up repeating a few things.
The Intlwota process isn’t brought up a lot, but there a few things to say. This is a group blog. The different contributors have different styles. This isn’t just shown in different writing styles, but frequency of updates. The Write For Us page is no longer linked, but it basically stated that contributors are free to update at their leisure. This is going to create different paces for different days – one day may have several contributors updating in real time and another day can have most of the entries coming out on a schedule by a few (Ray) contributors.
Yoshimi – you have had a few entries that haven’t been linked for a few days. This is going to happen just by the nature of how Intlwota gets updated. Even contributors to the site have posts on their blogs that aren’t covered on Intlwota for a few days, and sometimes not covered at all. News and reactions that are widespread are what are most likely to be updated as soon as possible. Everything else is dependent what and when the contributor covers. All that being said, this has been notably a slow week for Intlwota.
Furthermore, as Ray said, every single post on every single bog is not covered. No contributors for Intlwota are obligated to cover any particular blog. This would be a mistake if implemented. Intlwota works well now because people are allowed to cover the blogs that they like. Contributors covering blogs that they don’t like would be a disservice to the blog covered. In the wake of Intlwota’s birthday, some bloggers have mentioned how happy they are to get the “Recommended Reading” label. How can someone who doesn’t like the blog that they are covering recommend it to others?
I disagree about Intlwota entries “not needing something interesting to say.” This isn’t to say every Intlwota should become a full entry in and of itself. However, if Intlwota didn’t have descriptions for the blog being covered, it’d be Feed of Pop. Intlwota would become an aggregate like FoP was instead of a group blog.
I think it is for the best that you are asking these questions. It never hurts to get these issues out.
Comment by CKHPblog — 2008/04/04 @ 11:19 pm
For me, I am happy to see anything I write here. Although not all of my posts have been placed in IW. Sure, I was disappointed. But I also understand that the staff is not obligated to post anything that I write, and the list of people blogging to this site is growing every day. I have no idea how many posts they look at on a daily basis, but I am sure it is quite a large amount. So I am just thankful for the ones that they do write up.
Comment by Radicalpatriot — 2008/04/04 @ 11:42 pm
Interesting and healthy discussion. I haven’t had anything recommended here since my Manoeri piece many moons back on BIJP, despite the fact that two recent posts — the one about the Detroit7 bar-fight experience on Radreview and a retro report on Abe’s 2004 graduation on BIJP, my Vox blog — stand as two of the best pieces I have ever penned, bar none. Neither received any reaction from IW.
But there are two factors at play:
1. Sheer geometric growth in blogs and posts.
2. Incredible growth in quality of these posts.
It wasn’t too long ago that IW had to sift through miles of mush just to get at the few nuggets of interest to recommend to the blogosphere. Now, a year after IW was ushered in, it’s the other way around — very little mush and an astonishing flood of quality.
That’s one reason to wade into this metablog concept with YankeeOtaku, at least on a beta-test basis for now. The emphasis at YO will be cruising through newer blogs first, then seeing if anything significant is being overlooked by the established producers here.
Another pair of eyes can be pretty handy to have around.
Bottom line that every visit of mine to AW and IW lately has been an adventure, and hopefully it will stay that way.
Comment by Vee — 2008/04/04 @ 11:48 pm
This is quite the symposium on Intl Wota relations. As I’m up after three hours sleep and sucking down coffee, and that seems to my best time for free-flowing thought, I’ll put in my $0.02:
Yoshimi, I feel you. Wu-san used to cover my beat, too, before he went on hiatus. But really, after a couple of days, I became far more concerned over JUST my C-ute review getting posted than any of the other entries. I’ve had every contributor under the IW editorial belt swoop in and vouch for my articles over the last year, until Wu unofficially made it his regular place, unofficially. If I didn’t know for a fact that writing for IW would give me a panic attack (perfectionist that I am), I’d cover yyY! myself…Wu’s write-ups made me take notice of your blog in the first place. Please don’t think because you’re not written up doesn’t mean a lot of us aren’t checking you out. If only my stupid LJ layout would let me link to more than, oh, TWENTY blogs at a time on the sidebar…
To Ray, pengie, broomhead: excellent thoughts. It’s not usual that such a high profile (I like to inflate my personal sense of IW’s purpose as often as possible) site have such open and candid dialog on these issues.
Comment by jimhaku — 2008/04/05 @ 4:52 am
I only get about half my stuff pinged cause I’m not always writing about J-pop at all. I usually know right away if it’s going to or not. Sometimes stuff gets pinged and I didn’t expect it to. When I’m sure it will it still takes 3 days on average. I try not to care about it because I don’t want to change my writing but it’s still pretty exiting sometimes. IW has kept me going doing it even if the stuff is not always picked up. I’m subscribed to about 250 blogs now and I don’t have time to read even half of them. It’s nice to know people are taking time for you.
Random fact of life related to noone’s opinion: unicode titled blogs are at the bottom of the Bloglines subscription list. I like Yossha myself and made a note to get to it but I still don’t just because of that. Again, you shouldn’t be changing to get noticed, but there’s always something stupid like that.
Comment by jimhaku — 2008/04/05 @ 5:01 am
Something else happened on my blog recently: I started getting pings from an anime meta blog. Except it’s completely automated. It will ping me everytime I use the word “anime”, whatever I’m talking about. I thought it was cool at first but as soon as I figured out it was automatic I stopped caring.
Comment by CJ Marsicano — 2008/04/05 @ 5:34 am
Apparently the regulars have “beats” now? Ray told me this in an e-mail the other day when I asked him what in the hell was going on, and I was a bit confused. Isn’t the todolist app that is available to all contributors to the site supposed to eliminate these problems? Now I’m beginning to wonder if its actually causing them.
Comment by maiZe — 2008/04/05 @ 6:08 am
To quote CJ: “Apparently the regulars have “beats” now?” If so, I certainly hadn’t realized this. I have blogs that I read regularly, but I don’t cover every post of theirs, either because someone beats me to it, or as Celestia said far back in this discussion, I don’t feel I know enough on the topic to comment on it.
I don’t know if I should be talking about the behind-the-scenes stuff here, but I’m pretty sure the purpose of having the To Do List for contributers was to make sure people don’t overlap on the posts since we have more people doing write-ups now. It’s not a place where assignments are handed out.
Basically, all blogs/posts are on a first come, first serve basis. If someone’s already called a post,it means they’re interested but don’t have time at the moment but want to do a write-up.
Regarding all the other stuff, I think Ray and broomhead covered it sufficiently. We cover what we can, but with only a few people who contribute daily compared to the enormous number of posts that are out there (my feed reader constantly has 200+ unread items) it’s impossible to assume that everything will be covered.
Comment by johpan — 2008/04/05 @ 6:44 am
Call me a pushover or whatever but I’ve been noticing that a few of my posts haven’t been getting covered… What’d I do about it? Shrug it off.
Most of the posts that get passed up are my remix posts (except for Baby cruising Rider) which I hold so close to my heart . I know maiZe covers Kawaiirrhea’s remixes because she like them (and they are awesome! XD) but I’d rather have no one cover my remix posts if the only person going to cover it is my sister (if you didn’t catch that, maiZe is my sister). I feel that doing something like that lowers everyone’s and, especially, your credibility.
Since my review and opinion pieces are the ones that get up here most (thanks guys!), I like the idea of people just stumbling upon my remixes and be like “ooooo!”. I also like the idea that people like my writing enough that they subscribe to my feed on their own, outside of IW. Maybe I have the wrong idea but I use IW as more of a stepping stone to other blogs than anything else. If I enjoy an article I’ve read, then I’ll do something about subscribing and if I really love them, add their blog to my blogroll.
I don’t feel IW plays favourites around here. Whenever some of my posts don’t make it up, I just think that either they’re too busy or I need to step up on my writing style. It’s usually the former though since I’m perfect and don’t need to fix things like that ..yeah.
Comment by Ray — 2008/04/05 @ 6:45 am
CJ:
Actually, for the regular contributors the OurToDoList plugin has become the lifeline to allow them to contribute more regularly and to improve the quality of posts. Because of it, there is no need to write something in a rush for fear of somebody else “claiming” a blog entry before you, and we’re all made aware of each other’s plans. When it was just me and Wu-san doing daily posts, this wasn’t necessary; now that there’s more regular contributors involved, we really can’t function as smoothly without it.
And we don’t have beats in the sense of lists of what each of is supposed to cover, but rather we have a sense that certain contributors tend to be attracted to certain kinds of blogs or topics and we try to be respectful of that. If we look at most everybody’s contributions to the blog, there’s a clear sense of things they prefer to write about for IW; Jim looks at shibuya kei pretty regularly, pengie tries to bring in new blogs, and you have your own focus as well.
We’re at an interesting juncture for Intl Wota, in part because we’re continuing to grow and develop and it seems our community is growing more rapidly than before. (The reason I don’t want to be definite in this statement is my constant eye on attrition.)
A check of the first page of each month’s archives would be instructive here. For much of the first year of our existence, I played the primary role in providing daily posts, and Intl Wota practically became synonymous with me, for better or worse. The help from other contributors was very much needed and appreciated (especially for the different perspectives and voices it brought), but it was occasional at best. When Wu-san signed on to do regular posts, that helped considerably (especially since he developed his own unique style and came into his own very quickly) but the volume work was still being done by me.
Now, with the influx of new contributors – broomhead, maiZe, Celestia, and IndigoSkies – as well as a renewed role from pengie, we’re dealing with an ACTUAL STABLE OF REGULAR DAILY CONTRIBUTORS. This is a new development for Intl Wota (less than a month, really), and it’s a very welcome one, but it’s also requiring changes in our work process and shifts in the infrastructure. (That includes turning this dictatorship into a troika, by the way – I’m no longer the only one in charge, pengie and broomhead are now admins and have an equal voice with me on the direction Intl Wota takes.) And while the new initiatives are still not taking off just yet – the Press and the Samizdat and maybe one or two later surprises – that’s only because we’re still short on resources and trying to find this new steady ground for Intl Wota the blog before turning our attention to expansion and empire-building.
That said, no one should have any expectations to be automatically covered by Intl Wota just because they’re writing about J-music. If you’re writing about J-music, that’s the STARTING point by which we consider a mention in Intl Wota, but of course there’s a filtering process that has to do with everything I mentioned earlier. And for the seeming growth of our community and the sheer flood of posts on a daily basis, we’re still undermanned.
Let me repeat: NO ONE should have ANY expectations to be automatically covered by Intl Wota. That includes myself, by the way, and that’s how it SHOULD be.
Now, if people want to better assure that coverage is improved by Intl Wota, that fewer quality blog entries falls through the cracks – JOIN US. The more voices Intl Wota has, the more those voices express themselves on our site, the better Intl Wota becomes. This past month’s developments show that, and I think we’re only at the very start of that growth curve.
This is fun. We should’ve done this for the first year anniversary, except things hadn’t even changed much then.
Comment by pengie — 2008/04/05 @ 7:59 am
Well said again, Ray!
I certainly don’t expect my own posts to be covered–for Airi’s sake, I’m a staff member!–but when they do, it’s a pleasant surprise. I’m actually kind of baffled to see that there’s now this mindset of “every single post of mine needs to be covered!” because that just… doesn’t seem like the purpose of IW. Maybe I’ve been approaching this differently, but if you get, say, three to four blog entries linked in a row on here, won’t you automatically bring in hits from people who have then taken note of your blog? I think it may just be me thinking this way, because I honestly don’t check IW for most of my daily reads–I have my own blog sidebar for that, and that’s how I keep track of people who I really want to read, posted on IW or not. I check (and post on) IW for what’s notable and interesting, and if someone in my sidebar gets a post on IW, chances are I’ve already read it.
Sure, free publicity doesn’t hurt, but you have to keep in mind that the staff that does currently work on the website is kind of overloaded. Just look at our linklist. The total IW effort has to check that entire list pretty much every single day, and then go looking for new blogs on top of that. I don’t contribute to the posting as much as I contribute to behind-the-scenes work now (and hosting wotachat, although that’s been a, um, difficult effort lately), but when I do sit down and try to go through 10-20 blogs for updates it’s just… overwhelming. 8|
Comment by Vee — 2008/04/05 @ 8:21 am
I’m just so happy that this place even EXISTS…pengie is absolutely right. I have the blogs I check regularly anyway…but there are a TON of posts/new blogs/overlooked blogs (due to the sheer volume of places I like to visit every day) I’d never know about if it weren’t for IW…such as Kawairrhea’s remixes, which I love, or worship sites/eye candy/unexpected things that slip under the radar.
It’s an honor to be part of this group. Like Jim, it’s what keeps me writing, and it’s also what got our blog noticed in the first place. So, shine on, you crazy diamonds.
Comment by craig — 2008/04/05 @ 11:06 am
I don’t have any favourites in my favourites folder, I don’t use feeds… I google “yodc” to get there
That’s just how I roll X)
Comment by broomhead — 2008/04/05 @ 11:43 am
That’s some good SEOing there Craig.
Pingback by American Wota 3.0 » On Blogging » Intl Wota and the N.W.O. (New Wota Order), Part Two — 2008/04/09 @ 7:33 am
[...] had a great deal of fun with the recent Intl Wota comment thread describing how we work and the selection process for being covered by the current Intl Wota crew. [...]