![Picture 1 in [Anime Blogger Panel]](/images/wp-uploads/2008/10/panel.jpg)
While most of us are introverts and hikikomoris that lock ourselves in the room all day and blogging hoping that complete strangers would take notice of us and eventually make our blog famous so that we may one day become Omni and have the awesomest blogging site of the century, it seems a group of prodigal anime bloggers have made an effort to bring to the society a little more awareness of the anime blogger community. I was pretty late at finding this because RL gets in the way sometimes, but for those of you who do not yet know about the NYAF Anime Blogging Panel by Hinano, JP Meyer and DS from Daijoubu, you can watch it here: http://animediet.net/conventions/nyaf-anime-blogger-panel-the-video
On first thought, when I looked at it, I was like, hey why didn't I see this before? And I noticed that the last few weeks I spent less time on the computer than I spent in the toilet. Next thing I noticed was the bloggers. Now, this comes as strange, but my initial reaction was that Hinano was nothing like what she depicted herself like in Renai Blogger. I was wondering who that was, because they said there were 3 people were on the panel, but surely that couldn't be her? Until she came up and said, I'm Hinano, I was like... OMGOSH Hinano's a LOLI!? And an ojou-sama type one at that. I couldn't help but feel dizzy for a while.
There were a few things that came up during the panel were about team blogs, and the guys didn't quite mention any of the really big ones like THAT or RIUVA or Random Curiosity, which came as a surprise. Perhaps being in front of a crowd was a bit of pressure on them, making it difficult for them to come up with some good real life examples. Perhaps we should give them a nice big blog list of good blogs to read sometime for them to put up on their slides. I think they actually left the impression that there wasn't much in the blogosphere at all, which couldn't be further from the truth.
Also, the team tended to talk quite a bit about flamers and trolls, and it seemed like one of the negative things that could have a positive twist on them. They demonstrated quite a bit of raeg and haet there in terms of flame wars and post deletion that weren't really helpful or informative for bloggers. Also, in terms of people asking for downloading, it didn't seem appropriate to say that this stuff (anime, manga) is easy to find or download, especially at a convention where companies were actually selling stuff at. I personally wouldn't be too comfortable saying I just downloaded Macross Frontier at a big convention at a microphone in front of everyone.
However, on the upside there were lots of good advice that the team gave, for example, they did mention blog burnout, which is a big problem most bloggers face over the period of maintaining their blog. JP Meyer mentioned that blogging was not something bloggers should feel pressured to do consistently, and said that he sometimes blogs because there are lots of good shows and there's lots to say about them, and sometimes you don't blog much because all the shows are crap. He made a good point when he said that you don't watch an anime with a blogging mentality but actually enjoy the show and after you're done with it you go, "Yeah! Alright now I'm gonna pour out a 3000 word post on how awesome this is!", pretty much sums up what should be happening on a good blog.
Dan also made some good points about what other sites such as Twitter and MyAnimeList are useful for things besides blogging. To be honest I had no idea Twitter had a 140 word limit per post because I never used it, but apparently, that's what it sounded like, which was cool, "I just downloaded Macross Frontier and am watching it now" which is a great way to send a heartbeat out to the internet.
Overall, I say kudos to DS, Hinano and JP Meyer for being so entertaining up there and bringing the anime blogging community to the world. Also, the owner of the blog Omonomono Omo made a cameo appearance at the end of the show. Its kinda fushigi to see all the guys and girls out there who were previously unknown (in the physical sense) to suddenly come out and show themselves, like a shadow pulling off its 2-D-ness. In the case of Danny Choo however, it was akin to seeing God himself.