Posts Tagged “Websites”

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.

This blog takes no official position on smoking but it does support multicolored skies.

In this edition of Potluck: reaction to Mario Parva’s interview and to some unsubstantiated Amazon listings, a different sort of team blog is born, and a small morsel of anime sales data.
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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.

If you haven’t heard by now, “leading lifestyle destination for men” CraveOnline has acquired social networking website MyAnimeList. Unlike Mania’s buyout of AnimeOnDVD, I would not expect there to be drastic visual overhauls and it is comforting to know that Xinil will remain lead administrator and editor-in-chief.

From Xinil’s post on the MAL general forums:

This acquisition enables MAL to continue to grow without being burdened by rising server and bandwidth fees (which have increased a lot lately), and helps us branch out into more beneficial features (think video). CraveOnline has no plans to change our community or thwart the direction we’re headed. If anything, they’ll help us get the things we need faster and more efficiently.

Onto the slightly worrying part: in the press release, Mike Dodge, SVP/General Manager of AtomicOnline (CraveOnline’s parent company), said that “MyAnimeList continues to bolster CraveOnline’s leadership position in the highly competitive online male youth market“. As far as I know, the general anime and manga fan community is diverse between both genders and MAL shouldn’t be too different.

A quick advanced search of MAL’s user base conducted this afternoon shows that 14,107 of its 79,056 users have described themselves as female, 19,364 as male, and 45,585 have not specified a gender. So that means out of the 33,471 who picked one or the other, it’s 58% male and 42% female which seems to be a pretty good balance.

I’m not intending to make a mountain out of a molehill so I apologize if it appears that way but my minor worrying is based on a perception of AtomicOnline’s attitude toward its brands. While I know MAL won’t be totally messed with, there could be a change in the way it is marketed toward non-users and in potential shifts in on-site advertising including cross-site promotions.

I’m only half done and I’m already tired…

The sixth day of this series of twelve things from 2007 that affected my anime-related life brings me to discuss another website, but this one is in English: MyAnimeList. I previously mentioned MAL as part of a multi-topic post I wrote in April and since then, I’ve used it almost exclusively to track my progress in various series. The last site I had used to keep track of what I’d watched was AnimeDB and I still have an account on that site but I don’t update it anymore likely because it’s too tedious a task for me to remember which fansubbing groups released the particular episodes I watched. It’s just easier to push the plus sign to add 1 to your episode total.
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The fifth thing from 2007 that had an impact on me as a fan of anime was creating an account on Nico Nico Douga. I had first heard of Nico Nico Douga in bits and places before May but I got my first true dose of Nico during the Damn You Internets panel at Fanime. Thus on June 1st I signed up for an account on Nico so I could see a swath of random Japanese videos with a bunch of comments streaming across them, some of them cleverly timed to flood over the actual video. At first I was able to watch videos from 1900-0200 JST (2-9am PST) since I was member 1,213,569 and the cutoff point for all-the-time access was 888,888. A couple weeks later, that line was expanded to about 1,100,000 and then a month or so after that, I had no time-of-day viewing restrictions.

The stuff I’ve been watching over the past six months has been mainly MADs and anime openings/endings, although I did find a TV episode of baseball bloopers split into three parts and earlier this month I watched a couple men with paper masks play their way through Wii Fit’s different mini games. The next step will be to begin watching the “raw” anime episodes that are on the service (especially the older ones like Lupin III), which now that I think about might be an interesting way to checking out series without downloading a couple episodes or, if licensed, buying the first disc or the first couple episodes digitally.

And remember, you can turn the comments off and just watch the original video if they become too overwhelming.

I was just catching up on a couple days of unread AnimeNano RSS feed backlog and read about Hinano’s situation with YouTube taking down her “Otaku Idol Haruhi Dance” video. After going through the comments of that post, I’d like to add some things regarding the topic and attempting to use my rudimentary legal knowledge to complain about media companies’ throwing their weight around, distressing licit creators in the process, and YouTube’s inability to tell those companies “That’s enough!” Read the rest of this entry »

I forgot to talk about this when it happened a couple days ago when it happened but ANN dropped the big ad on the left side of their pages and made it look more normal. I like the slightly wider and uninterrupted space for the main news listing and today their logo gained some holiday spirit.

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