Sunday, April 23, 2006

Welcome, Calaya!
Calaya has joined our moderator team. She will serve as our cosplay site's member ambassador/moderator. Welcome!

I was doing a little marketing-type research last night. Turns out one of the most popular anime keyword searches online is "anime girls." Bleh, not a niche I want to spend much time on.

Maybe when we have tags we can do special tag-based sections, like "anime girls" - "anime boys" - "yaoi" - "for Adam" - "Katamar-insane"

What's cool is that we're probably the most gender balanced anime site online. Most sites are 99% male. We're actually something like 55% female. No complaints from me--3/4th of the best anime news editors in the world are female ;-).
Comments (7) | Permalink

Friday, April 21, 2006

How Are We On Speed?
How are we doing on speed? Is it just me or do comments, despite all my tweaks, still load really slowly? Mmmm?

I got 40 emails today, many that required actions/responses/etc. so that kept me from doing any sort of programming.

One interesting thing about my personality is that I can have huge swings in my feeling about things. Like I'll be working on a project and, in the middle of it, I'll feel that it's going terribly and it'll be a huge failure and I should quit, etc. etc. Then a few days later I'll think it's the greatest thing on Earth.

While the faults of this are clear, these swings really push me hard. When I think things are going terribly, I'll get frightened and work 10x harder. When I think things are going amazingly well, I'll get really motivated and work 10x harder.

UPDATE: Gail has gone Katamar-insane
Comments (7) | Permalink

Thursday, April 20, 2006

Hopefully It'll Be More Successful Than the Comic Thing
I have an editorial side project in my head. I think it could be big. It's bold, unique, and should be easy to maintain; just need to find the right people.

What's most interesting though is that the project will definitely appeal to our audience and way beyond. I can see people who hate anime loving it.
Comments (5) | Permalink

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Sometimes I'm Quite Playful
I spent a little time on the tags feature today. It'll be quite good.

I got a very long, formal email from someone in Japan. They do sales for some sort of anime-esque game. He asked if we could meet at E3 to talk about the game. Being playful, I countered with the following:

"Thanks for your warm email. Unfortunately I won't be in attendance at E3; I'm based in New York City so it's difficult to visit LA. If you're in New York City, let me know and we can have lunch to talk about your game.

If your company would like to pay for my travel+hotel, I would be happy to visit you in Tokyo as well to discuss things."

A boy can dream, no?
Comments (8) | Permalink

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Guilty Pleasure
Saw Pride and Prejudice tonight on a whim. Would be great to have a national holiday devoted to speaking with inflated verse.
Comments (3) | Permalink

Monday, April 17, 2006

   I Should Be Asleep
Thanks to beyblader for notifying me about the glitch with the myOtaku permalink option. Fixed.

So Kei has a wonderful interview up! Go read, hurry, hurry, hurry!

I believe strongly in tackling problems before they become problems. So in anticipation of running out of disk space (we're at 80%), I've had a new hard drive installed on our main server. This new hard drive can store up to 120,000 anime wallpapers (wallpapers take up the most space).

If we get 100 new wallpapers a day, that's 3 years worth of content.
Comments (5) | Permalink

Saturday, April 15, 2006

Health, Deal in the Works, Advertising
Note: The reason the comment manager doesn't show who posted the comment is because we store people's usernames in another database table. Thus, to get that data, we'd have to run a lot more queries, which I'm concerned would overburden the site as a whole.

My health is still in bleh-ville. If I don't recover next week I'm going to see a doctor. I'm extremely averse to the idea though and hope I can fix myself.

In any event, it hasn't kept me from site stuff!

Right now I'm in the process of negotiating a multi-faceted deal with another site that should have the pleasant side effect of giving our news team some interesting new opportunities.

I also quietly launched today a platform for letting people advertise on theOtaku. I get a lot of emails from very small anime mom&pop stores curious on how to get their ads up and running. Hopefully this will help them through the process.
Comments (7) | Permalink

Thursday, April 13, 2006

Comment Manager?
How are you liking/using the comment manager? It's been a while now.
Comments (8) | Permalink

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

   Adam Does Guatemala
Both my Internet connection and I have been sick lately. I should be fine by tomorrow though. I think I need to sleep more, hm...maybe one day I'll take a break from the site. Like an entire day without it. I think it would be the first time in months.

A newspaper reporter from Guatemala emailed me asking to help him understand the anime industry. Apparently it's a growing phenomenon there. Maybe I'll post some of his questions with some of my answers.

Kei has a fun interview coming up. Can't wait to see it live; her first one!

WOW! We got 1,000 visitors yesterday from myspace. That's more than we got from Yahoo! I guess a lot of people have quizzes/ecards/blogs linked in their myspace profiles. Crazy.

Today's Haiku:

Spring winds
Gently flow across the grass
A squirrel's arch
Comments (4) | Permalink

Monday, April 10, 2006

   Long Tail of Searches
Wow, we're pretty much bullet-proof for search engine traffic. Even if all our best rankings disappear, it won't even have a noticable effect on us.

Why?

I ran some statistics; the top 50 keywords that search engine refer only account for 25% of the total.

Now that's diversification.

Here's a rough haiku I came up with today, inspired by a short walk through Central Park. (I ignore the 5-7-5 convention, I think it's a waste).

Two sparrows--
Even in argument
They sing.
Comments (2) | Permalink