Saturday, October 6, 2007

Today's Answers
What inspired you to make theOtaku.com and MyOtaku.com?

My first major site, AbsoluteGB.com, the greatest GameBoy/portable gaming site ever made (and most popular at the time), was adding a lot of sections based on anime. I created theOtaku.com because the name was applicable to both gaming and anime whereas AbsoluteGB didn't make sense as an umbrella domain. Also the name was an homage to two of my favorite sites: theDojo.com and Sega-Otaku.com. As you know, theOtaku eventually dropped all its gaming coverage and focused on anime (mainly because gaming took a LOT of time to cover on a day to day basis and anime was just starting to take off big) and the beginnings of theOtaku as an anime only portal was born.

The original idea for MyOtaku was to be a blogging service that was also the engine to submit content across a lot of different sites. When I made it, blogging was still at a very early stage and most blogging services sucked. I think we were pretty competitive when MyOtaku launched but that was years ago and technology evolves rapidly. No, MyOtaku was not named for MySpace, which I don't think even existed at the time. In fact, I think MySpace is a joke, personally.

What's your favourite dirty joke?

I don't like dirty jokes. I also never curse. I'm not hyper moral or anything, just not my style.

Are you hoping for Artpreneurship to be published in hardcopy, or are you happy for it just to be available as an e-Book?

I love this question

First, I don't think 'published' books are in any way inferior to digital books. If a book
is published, it simply means a publisher thinks that they can make a profit from it. Sadly, too, most publishers are wrong most of the time, so a majority of what they put out never makes any money. That's why publishing is such a sad industry--most publishing houses would go out of business if they stopped selling trashy romance novels

If you've written something that you think is great, then put it to the test. If other people love it enough to pay for it, then all you have to do is work obsessively hard to get the word out. If other people don't love it enough to pay for it, then refine it or start something else.

We've had a lot of success with Art of Otaku. However, even Art of Otaku is nowhere near a business, it's simply a small addition that gets drowned out in a network as big as ours.

To answer your question though, if a company wanted to publish Artpreneurship, it would do a few things:

(1) If the book sells at all (a big 'if' given the success rate of most books) then it would barely add to this network's bottom line

(2) I would get some more exposure personally, but to be honest, as the founder of a site like this, exposure isn't something I'm too concerned about. Most of what we do on this site reaches hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of people

(3) I'd have bragging rights, which might admittedly be cool

(4) It would take probably 12 - 18 months for the book to actually come out and once it's out I'd have restrictions on what I could do with the digital version

(5) It would no doubt take up time that I could have spent planning a new feature, working on a business idea, etc.

In the end, I never wrote Artpreneurship to be published in the traditional sense. Even if it had the potential to be like Art Of Otaku, it still wouldn't be worth the time to flesh out. I wrote it because I had a lot of ideas in my head I wanted to put down and I thought it would be a great asset to have down the line

You'll probably see me bundle Artpreneurship down the line with another offering

What's your favorite coffee?

I don't drink coffee, I think that orange juice/water/fruit has all the benefits without the side effects. I also don't like the taste

Have you been to Japan?

Yes. It was wonderful, such an interesting country. I do think Akhihabara (sp?) is over-rated, though. I ate lots of sushi and visited the Toyota factory.

Ooh yay...when are the results of the wallpaper contest going to be announced? XD

Hopefully Monday.

Boxers or briefs?

Boxers, no contest.

Is there a different kind of site (other than anime) that you have always wanted to make, but never got around to it?

Yes, I look forward to the day when I can step away from the network for an extended period of time and try a new venture.

However, I see so much potential with this network that I'm committed to it for our big relaunch and after. We still have a LOT of ground to cover.

I like to tell people that Version Vibrant is a startup because it'll be so new in many respects, but it's a startup with 35-40 thousand people a day visiting out of the gate. You really can't beat that.

How tall are you?

Six feet even

What is so appealing about Naruto? Why do people like it? Why do you like it?

I like Naruto because there's an element of strategy in it. I'm a huge fan of strategy games and watching Naruto, you'll notice a tremendous amount of strategy in the battles between two opponents.


That's all for today, I'll do more tomorrow...if you have any more questions you can post here.
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