Friday, May 5, 2006

Nana
Watched a few episodes of Nana...my god, it's agonizing to watch. I understand I'm not the target audience and I can understand why it's a smash hit in Japan among girls, but still...

Aside: If I had a LOT of money, I'd buy the rights to a quality anime from Japan. I'd then have it subbed really cheaply and then give it away free for people to watch online. I'd encourage other sites to offer downloads to their visitors, encourage music videos and fandom.

So how would I make the $ back? By selling merchandise and creating a special collector's kit DVD edition. Or maybe even selling a high-resolution version. Hm...I wonder how much an anime would cost to license.
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Thursday, May 4, 2006

A Hub on Sasuke
If you remember a previous post, I was consulted for an article by Guatemala's largest newspaper about the rise of the International anime scene. Article was just published and it looks like I was the only source they used! I was quoted like half a dozen times.

I wonder if there'll be a spike in Guatemalan visitors?

Also, I made major progress on fan art tags. This is going to be *big*. It'll be even bigger when we have tags on all our sites and create tag hubs. Imagine viewing all the content across our sites tagged with "Sasuke" or "Nana."
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Wednesday, May 3, 2006

Retroactive Tagging + Contest
I'm excited about this contest; should be a nice showcase for our audience's creative juices.

Also, it took some ingenuity, but you can now retroactively tag or tag-edit your fan art! Just click the 'edit' button and have fun with it!

Tagging doesn't just benefit us, it will let you better organize your art in the future and make it much easier for people to find it (which is important with the # of pieces we have).

Over 1,200 tags and counting...
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Monday, May 1, 2006

Project Management and CSS
I'm reading an amazing book on Project Management. The name is "Art of Project Management." Even though I've technically been overseeing project development for like 7-8 years and have taken formal coursework on the subject, I've still learned a lot from the book. And I'm on chapter 2.

Anyways...

The side project I've been talking about will use a different approach to site design than we've done in the past. Rather than laying out the site with images and HTML, I've tapped a specialist to do the entire thing in CSS.

CSS-based sites are light on images but achieve a kind of visual nirvana using code. They're usually very elegantly programmed and load lightning fast. Click here for an example.
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Sunday, April 30, 2006

Weeee 23
Just turned 23...as did my good friend James.

22 was an interesting year in retrospect. My highest highs and lowest lows. I've recovered from the lows and still have the highs to remember fondly. I think I'm positioned well for age 23 :-).

Also, many thanks to myO user The Mask for creating an entertaining 'happy birthday' site. It's in a "top 10" style. I'm flattered; good stuff.
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Saturday, April 29, 2006

Our Top 10 Tags
Almost 500 tags on the fan art site. Here are the top 10. It will be very interesting to see how things look when we have 5,000 tags.

(1) Naruto
(2) Sasuke
(3) Anime
(4) FMA
(5) Emo
(6) Kid
(7) Comic
(8) Violet
(9) Ichigo
(10) Mew
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Thursday, April 27, 2006

   Odd Hours Today
I fell asleep around 10:30 PM and woke up at 2:30 AM. Hm...I wonder when I'll go back to bed.

I quietly launched part of phase 1 for tags last night. I just labeled them as "keywords" on the submission page - the reason was because most people don't know what tags are. I do call them tags though on the actual fan art pages.

I'd say about 60% of art is being tagged with keywords now. 99% of people are doing a great job with it, there are a few wayward souls, but overall it's starting to look good!

Allowing people to edit or retroactively add tags will be somewhat tedious. But no worries, we'll get that up next.

...And then we'll start cross-linking them!
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Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Tags: Launching piece by piece
I'm going to launch the tags feature piece by piece. First, I'm going to start with the fan art site.

Phase #1: You'll see a text box on the submission page. You'll enter each tag separated by a comma. Multi-word tags are allowed.

On your art, you'll see the tags in plain text at the bottom. You'll also be able to edit and add new tags on each piece.

Phase #2: The tags will start linking to one another on the fan art site. There'll be a "tags cloud" page there as well that will display the most popular.

If tagging becomes a big success on the fan art site, I'll roll it out on all the other sites. I want to give enough time though to see how people use them/make adjustments/etc. This follows my development philosophy: Get stuff out there, see how users interact with it, and then constantly adjust/evolve.
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Tuesday, April 25, 2006

By The Numbers
0: # of free trips I'm getting to Japan :-(.

1: # of new, positive Art of Otaku press reviews received today. This one's in podcast form!

2: # of hours it took to respond to my email today.

3: # of days it took to decide on the name ARIGATO DAILY for the new side project.
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Monday, April 24, 2006

Name For New Project?
I'm hovering around the name ARIGATOdaily.com for the new side project I alluded to earlier. What do you think? Is it too long? Coming up with a name is driving me batty.
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