Archive for the “Websites” Category

This morning, I received the following e-mail message from Manganovel:

Manganovel Service Information Bulletin
—————————————

Manganovel
December 12, 2008

Termination of Manganovel Services

Dear Manganovel Users:

Please be advised that we will terminate all Manganovel services on February 27, 2009. Towards this, we will discontinue the following services as of today:
?User Registration
?Point Sales
?Posting of translation by Manganovel Users

Users who currently hold “points” will receive an e-mail from us around January 15th, 2009, detailing how to use those points.

For the meantime, Manga will be available for purchase if you have points, and you can also enjoy free manga.

We would like to extend our thanks to you for using Manganovel services.

Contact
For further information, please contact usercontact@manganovel.com.

I signed up for an account in October 2007 soon after its launch, downloaded the viewing software, and didn’t do much after that. The concept was that users would buy packages of points in order to purchase raw digital chapters or volumes (some of which were free) and different language translations uploaded by other users. Those users whose translations were bought received points in their account if they decide to charge for them (they could also offer gratis translations), which they could use to buy more digital manga. That’s a rough explanation from memory – I hope it sufficed.

I thought it was an interesting system when it came out but I quickly realized that the points currency was stuck within it (no cashing out) and that I didn’t really feel like trying to translate Japanese into English or German just to use that revenue to buy more chapters or translations of digital manga. I’m sure some dedicated users will miss the site and its weekly addition of chapters and/or user translations and it may have allowed budding translators an opportunity to practice their skills. It was an experiment in digital manga distribution using low-profile titles and though it may not have caught on in a large way, it did launch 10 months before DMP put up its eManga rental site and that must be worth something.

First thing that came to mind regarding the word ‘vice’

Anime Vice (or is it AnimeVice? or both?) has been in secret development for a number of months and it finally went live to the public last night. It’s part of the Whiskey Media network and uses the same basic framework as Comic Vine and Giant Bomb with a few differences. While AV shares standard features such as news, reviews, videos, a wiki-like encyclopedia, trivia, and forums, it also has dedicated cosplay and fanfiction sections. I would wager that the fanfiction section (built like GB’s guides system and a little hidden at the moment) will have slow initial growth that may pick up once a style guide is implemented; the cosplay section should naturally flourish due to the dedicated base of participants.

There already seems to be a fair amount of cross-pollination from both CV and GB and I imagine myself spending more time editing articles and engaging in forum threads on AV than on the other two, though I will still regularly visit GB for their news, reviews, and podcast. (I’m CalAggie on Anime Vice and knifefish on Giant Bomb.)

An errant thought came to me last night that AV could steal visitors from ANN with its added community features and lack of occasional big-ass ad themes. ANN will likely remain a 800-pound gorilla of sorts in terms of broad reach and name recognition but that doesn’t mean this new site can’t keep pace with them. Case in point: there is a “Liveblog” tab on the front page. And since community building has matured in the past 2 years and it is part of a network of sites, it is less likely to go under than animeOnline. *knocks on wood*

P.S. The Gunsmith Cats franchise page needs a helluva lot of work.

Even though the news about Crunchyroll’s deal with TV Tokyo for Naruto Shippuden, Gintama, and three other unnamed series came four hours after Viz’s announcement of their streaming plan, I decided to break it out into its own entry because there are different mechanisms involved in the CR case including more places of distribution, a tiered viewing system, and ditching of what initially grew the site’s popularity.

The terms of the arrangement are that paid monthly Crunchyroll members ($3/month is the going rate) will get access to subtitled streaming episodes of Shippuden an hour after it airs in Japan while non-paying members as well as Joost and Hulu users seeing the same episodes a week later. It is not clear whether those paid CR members will be allowed to download versions of those episodes, high-quality or otherwise. The first episode to be distributed will be the one airing January 8th and should be episode 90. (See the Viz post for projected Japanese airdates.) Since Shippuden currently airs at 19:30-19:57 JST Thursday and will likely keep that timeslot, the quicksub version should appear one hour later at 3am PST/6am EST/1100 UTC that same day.

What may be the more important aspect of this story to Crunchyroll’s future is the “decisive transition” (press release) from user-submitted to professional-provided content. By the same day this new partnership launches, all user-submitted videos will have been removed from the site and many users will likely have leave for other haunts, not caring enough to stick around a place where a significant amount of fansubs of anime and Asian dramas once resided but will no longer after Jan. 8th.

Co-founder Vu Nguyen remarked in his keynote address at Anime Expo this year that the amount of illegal downloads of Tower of Druaga and Blassreiter dropped by a significant amount as they legally premiered online in conjunction with GDH and that they will strive to find a balance between the desires of their audience and advertisers’ requirements while aiming to become an interactive experience built around content, not merely a venue for anime or other videos. An community thrives based on the quality and strength of its users and while the company may feel better about itself for assuming a no tolerance stance on user uploads (by disabling them entirely), their good intentions will, and may have already, leave many of their frequent, yet infringing users with a misplaced feeling of betrayal and abandonment and only time will tell if Crunchyroll will recoup its lost user numbers. High profile series like Naruto Shippuden and Gintama will certainly help them in offsetting an expected dropoff.

I received my first legitimate press release in the site’s inbox this evening and it did not seem exciting at first. It was sent by the The New Media Group and announced a collaborative content-sharing service to launch this December with Nico Nico Douga where Nico users will be able to view content from 20 “official providers” including as TNMG’s IPTV platform World On-Demand, MTV Japan, Avex, Bandai, and Livedoor. Wait, Bandai?!?

Yes, the anime and tokusatsu producer-slash-distributor is listed as one of many partners involved in this project (unclear if it is specifically Bandai Visual, Sunrise or both) so I have a little excuse to write about this. Frankly, there aren’t many juicy details except that Nico reportedly has 9.3 million Japanese (and secret foreign?) subscribers and commands either 2.3 or 2.9 million daily unique users, depending on whom from TNMG is trying to impress people. Simon Godden, President of e-learning service Teacher Tom Japan, thinks “this [deal] is a home run” so it must be great, right? Um, it guess it would be nice if you wanted to leave streams of comments on top of official music videos and foreign content as well as the swath of Touhou, IM@S, and Miku MADs that currently inhabit the site.

At any rate, you can read the entire release after the jump to get a few more optimistic quotes from executives focused on expanding the global reach of their managed brands.
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I don’t know exactly how long this was implemented (a week ago?) but Yukan Blog’s categorical annotated blog list has the potential to assist people in finding new blogs of particular strains, be they week-to-week episode chronicling, intellectual, humorous, varied in content, comprised of many writers, those of the Yukan staff, or yet to be filtered into a particular classification. (’Kings of Funny’ is gender-specific but its intent is understood.) Although I found only a handful of new blogs that interested me in an initial run through all classifications, others may have more success in discovering different voices that resonate with their prose-reading personalities.

This blog can be found under “little of everything” (i.e. miscellany) accompanied by the following, as of this writing:

When you don’t feel like watching anime for a while, CalAggie is here to deliver all the news! Not once has he blogged a particular episode or review any movies (or so blissmo thinks), so this is definitely the place to be if you just want to be updated with all the latest gossip in the Anime World. CalAggie is also an awesome guy himself, who started a Podcast a while back but is also willing to join the Podcast at Yukan if he can too. CalAggie is brilliant at wording his thoughts and his blog is really pretty. He also had an old blog some time back, and this is now his new one! CalAggie is a man searching to fill in his spare time.

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So I was listening to Buzz Out Loud today (episode 813) when heard them read a listener letter that suggested Alltop as a site for people who want homepages with news on a specific subject. I visited their collection of “online magazine racks” and whaddya know, there was an Anime category. The listing shows the latest 5 RSS items from 54 sites, which vary from actual news found on blogs and professionally-run websites to non-news items such as discount sales on AnimeNation and new additions to video streaming sites. I think the latter group should be excluded on the premise that their feeds are merely promotional and not truly informative, but I’m not operating the site, am I?

The site’s FAQ explains how they choose which sites to include on their channels:

We use a patent-pending, semantic computational algorithm derived from the post-doctoral work of Guy at Stanford. Just kidding. We rely on several sources: results of Google searches, review of the sites’ and blogs’ content, researchers, and our “gut” plus the recommendations of the Twitter community, owners of the sites and blogs, and people who care enough to write to us. Let us declare something: The Twitter community has been the single biggest factor in the quality of Alltop. Without this group of mavens and connectors, Alltop would not be what it is today.

As they mentioned, you can email them if there is an RSS-enabled site you think should be listed on a particular channel and it will be taken into consideration. Japanator is not currently listed on either the Anime or the Japan channels and Japan Probe is vacant from their “Japan” sub-site so I think some electronic correspondence may be in order.

I like the idea of discovering blogs I’ve never heard of (e.g. Wolf Hurricane) and surveying a single page to get a sense of what’s being talked about, but scrolling down the page each time could become tedious over time. There IS an option to hide unwanted feeds from view and the ability to restore hidden feeds but there is no way to rearrange the order in which the sites are presented so users have to deal with their “highly subjective and judgmental” ordering patterns. (Quote from the same FAQ I linked above.) I might use the site on occasion but I’m not planning making it my start page anytime soon, choosing to stick with about:blank for now.

I recently watched the premiere episodes of The Tower of DRUAGA -the aegis of URUK- and BLASSREITER on BOST TV, Crunchyroll, and YouTube to compare the visual quality and the placement of subtitles and also to see if they were shows worth following after the first two episodes. I decided to formulate two separate posts for each series so the next one will be about Blassreiter and will likely have the same technical results. (Links: BOST TV, Crunchyroll, and YouTube.)

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Okay, so I decided to create an entry on Wikipedia for Anime Nano this morning and I plan to also make one for Animeblogger later today. Over the past week, I’ ve been making little edits to other entries (including a lot of names of winning and losing All-Star Game pitchers) and felt that the website might be noteworthy enough to merit its own page so I made it. I know that a number of blogs have had posts referenced on various entries. Anyway, you don’t have to make an account on the site to edit it so feel free to correct whatever stuff I got wrong and flesh it out with more detailed information like the gritty details and features of the site.

P.S. Apparently, Mr. Miao thinks that Wikipedia is the greatest anime website ever, a statement I have to contend by pointing out ANN’s large database of information including seiyuu listings that do not have corresponding English Wikipedia entries, although many of those likely exist on the Japanese version of the site. (Crap, was that a run on sentence or what?) I find that there is a bunch of useful anime and manga information but there are also a lot of stubs that need more information added to it.

Back in March, I wrote about Anime on Demand, a program built on the .NET framework that allowed you to watch streaming fansubs outside a browser. I didn’t particularly use it much after writing that post except for saving my ass once during an anime club showing. (Never screw up Ouran when there are fangirls. Ever.)

Anyway, lunarising89 left a comment yesterday saying that none of the streams worked anymore and I checked myself to find that to be pretty much true save for a handful of titles like Battle Programmer Shirase. For most, a drawing of a ball-and-chain prisoner with a message of removal appeared for about 10 seconds. So I e-mailed the developer and webmaster Rathlar this afternoon to find out what was going on. His reply is after the jump.

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I can’t believe that it took reading about Bandai Visual’s rather high pricing of the Gunbuster and fans’ reaction to it at SakuraCon last weekend to get me to write a post after a ten-day absence. My explanation is that I was distracted by a bunch of things including classes, chores, laundry, compiling my radio playlist, spending Easter day with my family, anime club, and watching the first season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” on DVD. In that span of time, I start writing a couple of entries but I wasn’t able to finish them to my liking so I just moved on. In case you want to know, the first one would have been posted on Easter about religion in anime and would have focused on Scrapped Princess, FMA, and Chrono Crusade while the second was an informational post about MyAnimeList. Anyway, I apologize in advance if this is a relatively long post but I have a lot of stuff I want to discuss.

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