Once again, if you see me criticizing something about your blog, it’s nothing personal.  I tend to tear apart people’s websites when I do comparisons such as this, so just keep that in mind.

Aniblog Tournament | HTML Bracket

Round 1, Day 5

Vote Link

Match 9: Just as Planned

Just as planned has a pretty straight forward design.  Easy to get around, even if it’s not anything flashy.  The one thing I didn’t like in that respect is that, while categories are right there, they’re pretty broad, with most posts about Anime merely piled under a category called, well, “Anime.”  The content is kind of in the mid-range of length I guess, but still seems OK.  Moe Check! looks a bit sharper, and has some posts which are more in-depth than most posts on JaP, but most of the posts just seem to be one or two liners commenting on a picture.  Not really much there.  Also, Moe Check! has 7 posts in the month of April.  Just as Planned has 7 posts in the last week.  I think I’ll go with Just as planned on content grounds in this one.

Match 10: JanaiBlog

Rainbowsphere: Very nice design, very good content, but haven’t posted a thing since March 8th (and sparsely updated even before then).  JanaiBlog: Not as good design as RBS, and perhaps not quite as good content level, but still a pretty good level of content.  And they’ve posted recently, so I’ll go with JanaiBlog.

Round 1, Day 6

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Match 11: Colony Drop

This one is a big of a toughie for me.  Canne’s blog is more anime review (with some editorial thrown in) with some pretty good content and a good design. Despite only posting 6 times in the month of April, Canne’s blog still more than it’s competitor: Colony Drop.  However, CD has it’s own interesting design aspects, and I think an overall superior level of content – it’s just that posting is more infrequent.  So it seems like my choice is coming down to this: a little better content vs. getting more content.  I think if Canne had a significantly higher post rate, instead of just 6 posts in the month vs 3, I’d be inclined to take it, but since both are somewhat infrequent posters, I’ll go with the content winner, which is Colony Drop in this case.

Match 12: Beta-Waffle

If the last match was hard, this one is even more so.  How do you compare a predominantly comic blog against an episode blogger (all those who would vote against one or the other merely by what type of blog they are can skip that question).  Beta-Waffle consists of pretty consistently funny (if dubiously drawn) comics posted daily or every other day.  That’s a lot of work to keep it up like that, and Beta-Waffle certainly gets a lot of credit for that.

bananaMuffin, as you might have guessed, is the episode review blog.  bM certainly posts quite a bit, so it can keep up with B-W in that respect.  There is also a decent amount of content on the blog as well.  However, where I think bM stumbles is that it appears that, while postings are somewhat frequent, it’s posting episodes 1 and 2 of series when they’re pretty much airing episode 4.  If fan subs were slow, I could live with it, but I know for at least one of the series that’s not the case because I’m blogging it too.  Now, the caveat to that is it looks like they took a bit of a hiatus at the start of April, and they seemed to be keeping up with series before that.  Perhaps one plus in bM’s favor is that I do think it has the cleaner design.

I think in the end – and this is probably the longest rationale I’ve written so far – Beta-Waffle wins because, not only are they posting frequently, but it’s something that’s hard to keep up.  That combined with the immediate fact that bananaMuffin is behind and I think I’ll go with Beta-Waffle.  However, it would be an even tougher choice if bananaMuffin was keeping up with their series.

Round 1, Day 7

Vote Here

Match 13: Major Arcana

Black and Blue Socks appears to be pretty much an average, run of the mill episodic blog.  The content is pretty good and they appear to be posting pretty regularly (though they’re a little behind it looked like) and the design was OK.  There isn’t anything obvious I can really criticize them for, but there isn’t anything in particular that stands out about it either.  Major Arcana appears to be a mix of some episodic blogging along with editorial blogging with reviews thrown in.  Again, the content looks pretty good and they post at a pretty good pace.  This is a very difficult pick because these two blogs are very similar in how much they write, the quality of writing, and the rate of posting.  That means this one is probably going down to design and navigability.  I like the originality of Arcana’s blog better, but I think the navigability of BBS is a little better.  However, I think the navigability issues are a little closer than the design, so I think I’ll ultimately, by a sliver, go with Major Arcana.

Match 14: Mecha-Guignol

Daijoubu is another comic blog which posts (more dubiously drawn) comics. Occasionally anyway.  Mecha-Guignol appears to write mostly editorial pieces, which are nicely done, and appear to be pretty regular.  After a long string of some pretty long write-ups, I think this one will be short: quality posts + consistent posting…I think I’m giving this one to Mecha-Guignol.

Round 1, Day 8

Vote Here

Match 15: Ani-Gamers

Ani-Gamers, despite the blog’s name, appears to mostly do anime series reviews, as well as has an active, semi-regular podcast.  I know that keeping up a regular podcast is difficult – I put out 90 episodes of a podcast myself before finding that I just didn’t have the time for it in comparison to the number of people who were listening to it (which was basically no one).  I’ve had delusions of grandeur about restarting it again at time but…well, I guess I should move on since this isn’t about me.  The series reviews appear to be pretty informative, which is nice too.  The site design is a little unusual at first, but is still manageable.  Anime Full Circle has mainly, well, I guess you could all them editorials.  Kind of random scrawlings might be a better description for the type of posts that are on the blog.  Some of it is useful, but a lot of it is, well…random.  Perhaps it is someone’s cup of tea, but it really isn’t mine, so I’m going with Ani-Gamers.

Match 16: Anime Instrumentality Blog

This match involves something of a rarity: an anime music review blog.  That’s the role that Anime Instrumentality Blog fills.  It includes info like album title, show title, track list, music samples, and of course the review itself.  It’s really quite an interesting site to visit.  And being one that likes anime soundtracks myself, I’m rather sad that I hadn’t really run into this site before.  Maybe the only thing I could diss about the site right now is that the design may not be as clean as it could be, but it’s still not too bad.  Kita ze Inbou does beat up AIB when it comes to design. However, I have two major beefs with it. First, on their blog posts, the intro text on the home page is next to useless.  Second, I’m not much of a fan of taking so much space on headline and featured articles – all of which are, at the moment, at least six days old while the “new” content is buried toward the bottom of the page.  While the design of KzI is very tempting, I think I’ll go with Anime Instrumentality Blog

This is my first voting digest, where I’ll review how I voted in the first four days of the AniBlog Tournament.  I apologize for any hurt feelings for any opinions I might have for anyone’s blogs.  I can sometimes be overly harsh when I try to evaluate blogs for things like that.  Just a warning.

Round 1, Day 1

Vote Link

Match 1: Calamitous Intent

Not much to really say here.  I guess neither of these blogs are ones I would personally visit much, just because they aren’t about topics I would be interested in reading about on a daily basis, but just looking at them, it seemed like Calamitous Intent had overall better, well, pretty much everything.  And Loli Salad appears to have an issue with posting regularly, at first look.

Match 2: Sekijitsu

Wow, Sekijitsu is really snazzy looking, though something about it makes it look a bit overwhelming, which is why I had to think about voting for it for a while.  But I think overall better content, even if it’s a bit confusing to get around at first, won me over for this round.  Sekijitsu is the type of site that I’d dream of designing, until you see something like it as a live example and realize that, while looking cool is, well, cool, the people need to find your content too.

Round 1, Day 2

Vote Link

Match 3: Hanners’ Anime Blog

You know, this match was a difficult one to vote on.  The content of the blogs seemed to be on a somewhat similar level, as far as what and how much they wrote.  Perhaps Hanners’ pulls out ahead slightly in the writing quality category and how their posts are structured (I’m not a huge fan of breaking up posts with images quite as much as wat u say does), while wat u say might beat out Hanners’ in my “five second” test and navigability.  Hanners’ also posts more frequently (partly thinks to blogging more series, which I don’t take into account per se in my voting), having as many posts in about a week that wat u say has in about, oh, 3 weeks or so.  As I said it was close, but I just think Hanners’ had enough to tip the scale towards them.

Match 4: Paper Flower

I’m not sure what much there is to say here.  Despite not being an episodic blog, Paper Flower still had a lot of compelling content (not to bash non-episodic blogs, but I can understand how it can be difficult to keep a constant stream of good content without having it put right in front of you like episodic blogs do).  Maybe the only thing I didn’t like about it is that only 3 posts per page made it seem a little on the sparse side at first blush, but that was hardly enough to keep it from getting my vote this round.

Round 1, Day 3

Vote Link

Match 5: Hyper Parfait

I’m not sure how much it says when the top post on your blog has “Filler” in the title, but that is the case on Open Your Mind.  Also, the content seems to consist of a picture, and a typically very short smarmy comment on it.  Can be occasionally funny but, really, there isn’t that much there.  Hyper Parfait, meanwhile, is initially hard on the eyes with the “dotty” background and some of the “liney” stuff there, and I’m still somewhat dubious about the content, but it at least has significantly more content than OYM does.  Meanwhile, neither blog appears to have a problem with creating posts, so that’s not an issue.  I just think overall, on the content front, Hyper Parfait just has more there.

Match 6: 2-D Teleidoscope

With only 4 recent posts (having just come back from a lengthy hiatus), it’s somewhat hard to judge Grand Punk Railroad.  However, even before the hiatus, posting on the site was sporadic at best.  I think the content that exists in the posts that are there is good, it’s just that it appears to come quite infrequently.  Meanwhile, 2-D Teleidoscope, while certainly not winning points for design, the content that I read was also pretty good…and they post on a regular basis, so I’m going with 2-D on this one.

Round 1, Day 4

Vote Link

Match 7: chaostangent

A Product of Wasted Time seemed pretty simply, your standard anime/manga blog.  I don’t really pay attention to manga blogs that much, but it seemed like it had an average design, average quality content, average amount of content, etc.  There isn’t anything particularly good or bad that stands out about it. chaostangent, however, has an interesting design, a little better access to nav items such as categories and archives, a bit more in depth content, and it just seems to overall to be the more interesting blog, so I’ll go with it.

Match 8: 見ないで! ひとり言

This match includes the first blog that I’ve actually read at some depth before…and it’s on my blogroll, and that’s 見ないで! ひとり言.  However, I’ll try not to give anyone I’m used to reading an automatic vote.  So first up is 見ないで! ひとり言.  Perhaps it’s because many of the stuff I read off of there I get to from people linking to it, so it is the better-than-average content, but the standard daily content seems somewhat lacking in some ways.  I also don’t really like the fact that I can’t seem to find a categories list anywhere (though they do have the tag cloud, which I generally despise).  However, the fact that they do sometimes create some high quality posts can’t be discounted too much.  As for Caraniel’s Rambings, he has more stuff written, though I’m not sure he shares more of this thoughts on things than 見ないで! ひとり言 does.  Also, the way that CR breaks up their episode posts with images like they do is kind of irritating.  I think overall, I’m going to go with 見ないで! ひとり言, not because of what I like about it, but more because of what I disliked about CR.

And that wraps up the the first 4 days of competition, at least for me.  Oh yeah, and for those who might be using my HTML bracket, I’m going to be somewhat busy this weekend with family things, so my updating of the bracket may be sparse, though I don’t think any winners will actually be declared until after I get back anyway.

I won’t post who I voted for today in the AniBlog tournament, because I’m going to try to do a “digest” post every 4 days or so, encompassing who I vote for in the 8 contests over those 4 days.  Hopefully that will allow for a not-overwhelming number of contests per post while not overwhelming people with a post every day or every other day.  So expect my first “votes” post on Thursday.

Having said that, I wanted to highlight some of the things I was looking for when voting for blogs.  While I’m not doing any sort of formal criteria, the main things I’m looking for generally fall into three categories:

• Blog Design
• Type/Frequency of Content
• Quality of Content

Continue reading →

I kind of took it upon myself to go insert the AniBlog Tournament bracket into Bracket Maker, so that there was an HTML version of the bracket to look at:

http://www.bracketmaker.com/tmenu.cfm?tid=360785

Clicking on the blog name should take you to that blog.  I’ll add voting dates when and if they become available.  Let me know if you see any errors.

It’s not as clean as I’d like, but I’ve found Bracket Maker to probably be about the most useful online HTML bracket maker out there.

Thanks to overall #1 seed SeaSlugs, I saw that someone is running an Aniblog Tournament, taking 96 anime blogs, and seeding them in a tournament, NCAA Style, giving the top 32 blogs (see: the 32 oldest blogs, apparently) byes into the 2nd round.  Yours Truly is seeded 23rd, so I at least get a bye into the second round. Take that! At least I’m guarnateed of not being in the lowest 1/3!

Here is a direct link to the bigass bracket.

As a courtesy to my immediate neighbors in the bracket, I’ll go ahead and link to them, just so you can see who I’m up against, especially since one of the purposes of this tournament is to get people to visit blogs they might not normally visit.

I’ll be competing in the 2nd round against the winner of this matchup:

#42 Metanorn vs. #87 Oishii Anime

If I happen to get past the 2nd round (and remember, seeding isn’t really a true measure of popularity, just a measure of how much of your life you have wasted blogging anime), then I’d face one of these three blogs in the 3rd round:

#10 Omonomono / #55 Blue Blue Wave / #74 Fuzakenna

I’ll worry about the 4th round if I even make it to the 3rd round, haha.

Voting starts tomorrow, with two new matchups posted per day, but with each matchup staying open for a week.  That means, with 32 first round games, new first round voting should last from April 19th through May 26th.  I’m not sure who votes when (there have been a couple people asking for a schedule), but I guess I’ll find out soon enough.

With that voting schedule, my blog probably won’t come up for a vote until probably sometime in June (if I’m indeed correctly interpreting the schedule), which will give me time to perfect my new design (which I was already planning on launching) and launch it, hopefully soon after WordPress 3 is released, assuming it isn’t delayed too much.

Perhaps I’ll do a weekly digest, or post a couple of times a week, to say how I voted and to particularly highlight blogs I find to be pretty good, especially in the first round.  And I hope people will have fun, though I see some are already planning for mud slinging. :D