I was hardly the biggest fan when the Aniblog Tour­ney started. Suc­ces­sor to OEG? Those elit­ist chan­ners. Pop­u­lar­ity con­test? There are eas­ier and far more reli­able ways to do this than E-PEEN stroking (what would one call the girls’ ver­sion?), like com­pil­ing indi­vid­ual blog’s pageviews, read­er­ship (feeds), com­ment den­sity, etc. The fact I got rolled into it made me par­tic­u­larly uncom­fort­able: this was sim­ply not the type of com­pe­ti­tion I enjoyed, espe­cially if I have to face off against a friend on the first round.

But now that the tour­ney is on the road, I feel like the efforts of Scamp, meflo­raine, and RP are actu­ally com­ing off as very worth­while. The haters have entrenched them­selves far too deep in their own opin­ions to real­ize some­thing: the Aniblog Tour­ney is doing what the OEG should have done — pro­vid­ing spec­i­fied crit­i­cism that comes with con­struc­tive val­ues. The gems… lay within the comments.

Don’t take it wrong Scamp, I’m not prais­ing you. I’m only read­ing your blogs for research pur­poses on the other per­spec­tive alright? Research, that’s all.

How are the com­ments dif­fer­ent from the OEG? Sim­ple: the Aniblog Tour­ney itself doesn’t judge. There are no pre-established opin­ions with large red let­ters to argue for or against. When peo­ple aren’t too busy fight­ing fire with fire, we dis­cover that we can still have a civ­i­lized dis­cus­sion between humans. Wha— in my drama-laden anibl­o­gos­phere? There’s still hope for otaku yet.

Unlike OEG, which gen­er­al­izes to the extreme and over­loads their opin­ions with provoca­tive words, Aniblog Tour­ney com­ments are far more pre­cise and civil: I liked this, I didn’t like this par­tic­u­lar writ­ing style, the lay­out was schiz­o­phrenic, the ban­ner was NSFW, this post was god-tier and decided my vote. What do you know, real com­ments that are actu­ally use­ful? Ones that tell blog­gers that these kind of posts should hap­pen more and those types of wordi­ness may need adjust­ing? None of that HURR HURR YOU NOT OTAKU LIEK US trash.

Of course, many of the con­tes­tants in this tour­ney are sea­soned aniblog­gers who have estab­lished styles, so I’m not quite sure how use­ful such feed­back is. But for some­one like me, who is not only new to the blo­gos­phere but also still exper­i­ment­ing with dif­fer­ent blog­ging meth­ods and styles, Aniblog Tour­ney is pos­i­tively a gold mine.

So bring it on! It doesn’t even mat­ter whether or not I get knocked out first round. As long as I get some inter­est­ing com­ments any­how. Although… I still don’t like this feel­ing of pres­sure (TTATT )

Hope­fully, noth­ing will hap­pen that’ll make me eat my words and turn Aniblog Tour­ney into the Watana­gashi festival.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 22nd, 2010 at 23:59 and is filed under Random Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.