Bikkuri Project

Broomhead at True Life Seek has posted a survey for bloggers, and I thought I’d give it a whirl. Seems like a good idea, and I’m sure we could all learn a thing or two from reading people’s responses.

Goals:

• Why do you blog? Starting with the big question right off the bat, huh? I’ll just go with the obvious response, and say that it’s because I enjoy it and it gives me personal satisfaction. I think the rest will come out in my answers to the other questions.
• What long-term goals do you hope to accomplish, if any at all? Long term? None I suppose. I’d like to make more of a name for myself I guess. Maybe establish some regular readers?
• Where does your blog fail to meet your goals? I think things are going along all right. I don’t really blame my blog for any lack of recognition, lol. It’s my own fault really. I should either be writing better, self-promoting more, or both.
• If you do have goals, what will accomplishing them do for yourself? Again, just personal satisfaction.
• What do you want to gain out of blogging? A creative outlet? Praise from others? Personal satisfaction? Money? Lots of things. I neither expect, nor intend to get any money out of this. Why? Does someone want to give me money, because I’d be happy to accept. =p The other three are all good and important reasons though. Another is that I want the chance to talk about my fandoms with others who will appreciate what I have to say. My friends and family don’t care about Jpop, so a community of fairly anonymous people on the internet is my only way of doing that.
• Do you feel that your blog should meet a requirement for amount of entries? Do you feel any particular entry should be a certain length? I do start to feel guilty if I haven’t updated for a while. I’m not sure why, because I’m really not vain enough to believe that people are waiting around for me to update, or that anyone even notices when I don’t. It’s more like I really don’t want this blog to die, and if I get out of the habit of updating regularly, it might happen without my really intending it to. I don’t care too much about length. I try to vary them, because too many long entries makes for tl/dr, but too many short entries and it looks like I’m not even trying.
• For any particular entry, what motivates you to start and finish blog posts? Inspiration? That’s a good question. It varies I suppose, recent news events, a performance or song that I want to review, a comment made by another blogger or forum-goer, a picture of a particularly bad costume, or sometimes just a completely random idea that pops into my head that I decide I can build an entry around. I don’t generally partially write posts. When I feel inspired to write or do something I just sit down and do it, even if it takes me hours and keeps me awake far later than I should be staying up. When I try to write when I don’t feel like it, crap results, so it’s best to take advantage of it when I’m in a writing sort of mood. I’ll usually go back and edit later, but the content is all put down in one go.
• Do you actively consider long term goals for each individual post? Not really, no.
  

Subject Material:

• What do you blog about? Hello Project here, Johnny’s (mostly KT, and some Arashi) at my other blog, along with very occasional personal stuff, but I try to make that relate to Jpop somehow.
• Would you be keep a blog even if it wasn’t about the subjects you tend to cover? Sure. I had a livejournal about my life all through high school and part of college. I like this better though. The world of Jpop is much more interesting than my life tends to be.
• Do you write about the material to promote it to others? Sometimes… but I doubt that’s very effective, so if new fans are born thanks to my blog I see that as more of a nice side-effect than a main goal.

Readership:

• How much do you care about readership? I care a lot about my readership. If I wanted to write something for nobody to read it, I’d keep a diary. I don’t think there’s much of a point to having a blog if no one is reading it.
• Does it satisfy you to know people are reading, even if they don’t comment? Yes. Very much so! =)
• What effect does receiving a comment have on you? I’m always glad when people care enough about what I wrote to take the time to comment. It makes me quite happy. Come to think about it… I probably put more stock in comments than I should
• Do you write with a particular audience in mind or an unspecified general audience? Why? I write with the assumption that people have a general understanding of the topics I’m blogging about, so I guess that makes it a specific audience.
• If you write for a particular audience, is it International Wota? If yes, why? IW readers are usually well-versed in Jpop, so yes, them, but anyone else who is a fan or is interested qualifies too

Community: (The International Wota section)

• If International Wota didn’t exist, would you blog? Yes, but I’d probably be actively doing more self-promotion. I don’t like doing that though, so IW saves me a lot of trouble.
• When IW covers an entry of yours, are you encouraged to blog more or less? Neither? I don’t think I base how often I write on what IW does.
  
• When IW does not cover an entry, are you encouraged to blog more or less? Again, neither.
  
• How often do you read other blogs? Daily, some days I read more of them than others.
• How often do you comment on other blogs? More than never, but less than often.
• If another blog covers a topic that you wanted or wished to cover, do you still blog about that specific topic? Why or why not? That depends. If it’s just reporting some news, I don’t really see the point of sharing the same information again. If it’s opinions, I’d write about the topic if I felt like I had something new and different to say about it.

Commitment:

• How serious is your attitude towards blogging? Do you consider it just as something to do for fun? It is something I do for fun, but yeah, I take it fairly seriously. I mean, my family and friends and other commitments come first, of course, but it’s up there near the top of my list of favorite hobbies.
• How often do you blog? How often would you like to blog? When I first started, almost every day, but I’ve scaled down a bit because that was kind of crazy. Now it’s more like every other day. Lol. I think this is a good pace. We’ll see how much free time I have when I go to Japan and have a (dun dun dun) real job.
• What priorities do you or have you put aside in order to blog? Why? Nothing that’s really a priority. I’m not going to cancel plans with friends in order to blog or anything. Maybe I watch TV less? And like I wrote before, sometimes I stay up a bit too late, so if you consider sleep to be a priority…
• Do you see yourself blogging in 6 months? Why or why not Yep. I’ll be in Japan, and no doubt have lots of new and interesting Jpop-related experiences to share.

Personal:

• Would you say you blog for yourself? Indirectly. It’s more like I blog for the readers, and knowing that they are reading or even enjoying makes me happy.
• What is your feeling after posting an entry? Is it relative to the time and effort you put in an entry?Depends on the entry. I invest more in some of them than others. If I think something is really good or interesting, I feel kind of nervous, hoping that others will feel the same. Some entries are much less important to me though. I’m sure there’s a correlation to how much time and effort I put in.
• What needs does blogging fulfill? Attention, creativity, and companionship with like-minded individuals
• Do you consider yourself a writer? Yes
• Do you consider yourself good at writing? Good at blogging? This is an invitation to bragging, but yeah, I do think I’m good at those things. I don’t think I’d write or blog if I thought I sucked at it. It’d be depressing. I’m not saying I’m great at it or that I’m going to become a best-selling novelist (I’m not), but my teachers and professors have always told me that I was a very good writer, and all of them couldn’t be wrong.
• How much of your personal life do you share on your blog? If none, why do you leave that out? Some, but mostly only things that also relate to Jpop. I know you’re not coming here to read about how much I hate my physics class or my date with my boyfriend this afternoon. There have been a few exceptions, but I really try to keep them to a minimum. I have a “personal” tag to warn people away who are seriously opposed to reading anything that relates to me.

That was thurough!

~Celestia~

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