Friday, December 24, 2004

   Merry Christmas!
I just wanted to wish all our staff and visitors a Merry Christmas. I'm not Christian, but consider this holiday to be more secular than not anyway.

I look forward to working with/for you in the coming year.
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Wednesday, December 1, 2004

   Adam's Marketing Savvy Explored
I don't know if you remember my previous post, but I was really annoyed at our lack of a solid listing in Google for the term 'anime'. So I went to work and now we're on page #3. Not bad for a start.

I normally can't stand Microsoft, but I must say their new search is fantastic. You can check it out by clicking here. Why do I like it so much? Well, it's soon going to replace their MSN.com search and, when it does, guess what site will be listed #2 for 'anime'? Yup :-). Go see.

Best of all, not only are we #2 for 'anime', we'll be #2 for 'anime wallpapers', #2 for 'fan art', #1 for 'anime reviews', #1 for 'anime quizzes', and #1 for 'anime e-cards'. MSN must love us. ^_^
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Monday, November 29, 2004

   Great Post, My Response
I read a very well thought-out and carefully written article on Shapyi's myOtaku site about the things he believes we should do to improve ourselves. I have to applaud him for his efforts and I feel they definitely deserve a personal response, addressing each of the points he made in turn.

Voting System

The yes/no system wasn't actually brought about immediately; rather it came about through an evolutionary process. When I first created a fan art site many years ago, we used a scale system from 1-5. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a disaster. Our highest rated artist received a 3.8 out of 5. Extrapolated to a 10 point system, that means only a 7.6/10.

A yes/no system I feel gives better information to an artist. It's much better to say that 80% of the people who looked at someone's art liked it versus saying that someone's art, on average, received a 7.6/10. How many people voted above 7.6? How many people voted below? Did most people actually give your art a 10 and one person gave it a 2 and that's why it's so low?

Also, please remember that the purpose of ratings is two-fold. One is to give the artist feedback, and the other to allow sorting! That's why when I sort by rating in any category, I can see what tend to be the better pieces of art closer to the top.

(Also, HotOrNot uses a 10-point scoring system that's curved. Curving doesn't affect sorting but it does make artists feel better about themselves. However, on the flip-side, it sounds like a fantastic, fantastic technical headache to implement, especially since we already have hundreds of thousands of ratings in our database.)

Also, forcing people to type reasons why they want to vote 'no' would dissuade people from ever voting no, potentially leading to an artificially high and meaningless score.

Anyways I'll think about it. Just realize though doing anything like this would mean resetting our entire database.

Hall of Fame

Yeah, maybe. But it lets new visitors get to our highest rated artists in only 1-click.

Administration

I realize this. We've been working on it for a long time.

Anime Reviews

There are standards--maybe not in the ratings, but in the actual text of the review and in the viewer comments. We only approve like 10% of our review submissions. Between those three, you have a good idea of what to expect from the anime. (I'd hope no one bases their anime purchasing decisions on a rating score on any site.)
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Sunday, November 28, 2004

   Happy Post-Thanksgiving
Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I took a break from the site for a few days and now am back with full-energy to get things rolling. Hope you all had a nice meal and a nice break from school/work/daily routine.
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Wednesday, November 17, 2004

   Oh No...
I'm so happy I caught this in time. Apparently our network is going to transfer over 1 TB this month in bandwidth. This is VERY bad because for every GB over I get charged a dollar. So if we transfer just 1.3 TB this month - and we're on course to do more than that - it means my bill becomes $300 higher. I'm in talks now to up our capacity to avoid this.
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Saturday, November 13, 2004

   A Travesty
So, for some odd reason, despite the fact we're one of the biggest, highest quality, and most popular anime sites online, theOtaku.com isn't listed anywhere on Google when you search for the term "anime." Not even on page 100. I intend to fix that. *Evil anime laugh*
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Sunday, November 7, 2004

   Has It Been So Long?
I've been a busy bee lately. November and December have historically been our most popular and potentially profitable months. So I've been putting together a media/marketing kit.

More on the site, Justin and James have been diligently chugging along on improving myOtaku for its upgrade. I'm also going to be announcing some new staff soon.
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Monday, October 25, 2004

   Go Red Sox!
'Nuff said.
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Sunday, October 17, 2004

   Control Freak
It's not such a big deal with fan art, but I've been getting the chills looking at some of the greetings and wallpapers that have been auto-submitted.

Maybe we should disable that feature.

It's interesting to get press releases from companies who want to get their news posted on our site. It's hard deciding what our visitors would enjoy reading about. I got one today (twice!) from a company selling a book about the history of samurai. Not really anime related, so no luck for them.
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Monday, October 11, 2004

Been a While
Wow, it's been a long time now since I made my last myO post.

I've basically been insanely busy. As many of you know, I'm graduating college this year, and this requires a lot of running around applying to everywhere in sight.

I'm honestly not too thrilled with where I am now in that regard. While running this network has been a joy, it's also required a lot of sacrifices. For example, my GPA has really suffered, and that might keep me out of some grad programs I'd be interested in. GPA is VERY important in college.

Anyway, the crew and I talked today about a new backroom layout for myOtaku. Very excited about the possibilities there.
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