War Stories
Dang, I just read this totally awesome article by Jason Fry (via Slashdot), and I just about nodded my head off agreeing with everything he wrote. Granted, I don’t follow the Mets or read his blog, but his words really resonated with me. His experience sounds so very similar to my own experiences as part of Sea Slugs! over the last few years. For lack of a better format, here’s a little read-along play-by-play with the article (for the handful of you who might actually be interested):
“Hey man, you wanna do that blog we were talking about?” I asked him sometime in January.
And with that we were off, without the faintest idea what we were doing. After some test runs we wound up on the myblogsite service, about the only blog software that played nice with Greg’s rather elderly Mac. (I more than once suspected his machine might run on kerosene.) I picked a name – “Faith and Fear in Flushing,” in honor of Shea Stadium, the Mets’ decrepit home in Flushing, N.Y.
Ender, Kungfucius, and I started out pretty much the same way! I had mentioned some anime here and there on my personal blog, and I was inspired by Ender’s short-lived review site as well as Nowhere Anime Blog. With a little bit of wheedling, our unholy triumvirate was formed. Our axis of evil ran on Blogger and used our separate personal webspaces for screencaps, which was rather problematic once we got a few visitors. The move to the current domain and Wordpress was like a revelation (at least until Ender figured out how to defeat my ban on his posting from home).
Within weeks our daily page views crept up to around 200. Still, I could see by looking at our “referrer” links that a lot of that traffic came from people who needed help with Web searches. Given all the different words in our posts, I understood how Faith & Fear could have been a search result for one poor person who searched for how+to+lose+weight+by+vomiting. But what on earth made that person click through to be baffled by Mets blather? And why did we get a fair amount of traffic from people who’d searched for a combination of potentially sexual words and “pitchers?” (I eventually realized they were misspelling “pictures,” which is just sad.)
Hahahahaha, awesome. While our referral logs are not quite as entertaining (especially now that there is a script in place to block referral spammers), we have tricked a few sea life sites (which are of the spam blog variety) into linking us. Observe the power of a good title.
Best of all, Greg and I were still having fun; we decided to extend the experiment through the end of the season. While our audience grew, we were working to find our voices.
Ender and Kungfucius seem to bring in the majority of first-time visitors, with Ender’s posts appealing to rabid Gundam Seed Destiny zealots and Kungfucius’ extensive writings covering several popular, long-running series. As fate would have it, my most popular posts seem to reel in raving fangirls who squeal in engrish about how cute so-and-so is T__T.
Real Time has a potentially big audience, and I knew if I wrote about someone in the column, that person might read what I’d written. Despite that, I was stunned when one of the Mets’ broadcasters wrote to our Gmail address, irate over a passing comment on the blog. He’d taken the remark out of context, and Greg struck up a friendly correspondence with him, but it was a helpful reminder that while we could say whatever we wanted, we’d better be prepared to answer for it.
ZOMG, I soooooo badly want to meet a random person one day who has seen our site! One time in Guild Wars, Ender and I overheard a local chat about an anime series and started pimping out Sea Slugs! to everyone; sadly, no one responded. I have a secret dream of going to an anime con and off-handedly mentioning something about a review on the site to random people, just to see if they’ve heard of Sea Slugs! or if they will go and visit the site. I would even be fine hearing people dissing the site; you know, right before I stepped in and rained down hell.
I still had to delete automated “trackbacks” from astonishingly filthy porn sites looking to use us to increase their own search rankings. The downside of being a blog writer? Being a blog administrator.
Thankfully we moved to Wordpress before this became a maor problem. I think we currently have trackbacks disabled (what is the point, really?) and our spam filters have protected us from truly massive onslaughts. I don’t want to jinx us, but I don’t think I’ve ever had to eliminate more than a handful of spam comments in a day.
I also wasn’t prepared for how much work blogging was. Baseball already took up three hours a night; now it took up four — at least. Blogging about a thrilling extra-inning win was easy; blogging about a dull-as-dishwater loss wasn’t. And with more and more people reading us and commenting about our posts, blogging sometimes became a duty; we wrote at least one new entry for 190 straight days, including ones when one or both of us was tired, on vacation or not particularly inspired. (I’d been wise to pick a seemingly indefatigable partner — Greg’s Friday flashbacks to previous Met seasons became a particular favorite of our readers, and gave me a much-needed chance to recharge.)
Yes! While this personal blog is easy to maintain, since I can think of something stupid to say at least once a day during the business week, the anime blog adheres to a higher standard. Between downloading and watching the episodes, occasionally doing research, capping screenshots, and then writing the post up, the anime blog can be a hefty time commitment. Having a set routine helps a lot, but having partners in crime really keeps the engine going. I think our banter in the comments makes posting exciting and make commenting seem a little friendlier and warmer for new visitors. It also makes for the surreal experience of reading/checking for new content on your own blog…
In spite of the work in maintaining the blog, I love it, because I love to talk about anime, and the blog lets me do that without weirding out people around me. Although we haven’t approached a 190-post-streak, and other sites definitely have more visitors, posts, writers, screencaps, and speed, I like to think that the three of us have carved out a little niche for Sea Slugs! on the net. Here’s to hoping for even more fun and fandom down the road =).
Elsewhere Online | Kabitzin 10/31/2005
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By David, 10/31/2005 @ 9:06 pm
Rock on! Actually, forgot to mention this, but a couple of weeks ago, I once heard someone at UIUC’s anime club refer to Sea slugs
I believe the next stage is world domination!
By Ender, 11/1/2005 @ 1:02 am
David, are you sure they weren’t just talking about real sea slugs?
By David, 11/1/2005 @ 6:32 am
I heard snippets of ‘reviews for Yakitate’, so I guess that nudibranches are OUT! ^_^
By Kabitzin, 11/1/2005 @ 7:20 am
Mwahaha, totally awesome! Thanks for the spy information =).
By teahouseblossom, 11/1/2005 @ 12:36 pm
I can’t help but root for the Mets. Look at ‘em. They need all the help they can get.