Noteworthy

The Facts over Fiction of Idol Groups/Hello! Pro Rant! (Collab with Momoka) – Okay! Musume Time
Rant of Facts and Fiction (Collab with Kelly/Kerri/Chiima) – MomoMusu

Chiima has been one of the most active voices in the wotasphere lately, posting often and in several venues – including here, I’m proud to say. In a recent post, Chiima went for a different kind of collaboration: she and her friend / fellow blogger Momoka decide to tackle the same set of Hello! Project related questions on their respective sites. The results were illuminating in a couple ways.

First, the content. I wouldn’t say anything new is being said – longtime readers of the wotasphere have seen much of this ground covered time and again. However, we do get a very valuable overview of attitudes towards Hello! Project – not just these two bloggers, but of opposing opinions as well. Some of the questions seem like odd straw-men to me – such as the one about Berryz and C-ute disbanding (we don’t really know, do we?) or whether or not A-sides are always better than B-sides. But even these questions help in fleshing out a view of what Hello! Project is now and where they are headed as a collective. It’s an optimistic view between Chiima and Momoka, though difficulties are acknowledged readily.

Second, the format. Ideally, I’d have preferred seeing the answers for each question side-by-side. (I was lucky enough to have an iPad app to handle that, though a desktop browser would be even easier.) But with each blogger answering on their own blogs, you do get a distinct individual perspective developed over the course of the questions – as opposed to the point-counterpoint you’d get from a dialogue or roundtable.

It’s great to see such a collaboration between bloggers and it would be great to have more of it happening in different ways. I actually wasn’t familiar with Momoka’s blog until now, so it’s a great way to get more readers and expand one’s horizons some. As for different formats, we’ve got this shared question approach, and the venerable roundtable, and some may still remember Wota Wonderings. What about a round-robin of some sort, where each blogger posts on their own blog an answer to question, then poses a different-but-related question to the next blogger in line? Or setting up challenges of some sort, or having several bloggers tackle the same PV in a series of posts and responses? There’s a lot of creativity and opportunity available, just waiting to be used.