I’m sure many of you have noticed the Anime Blogger Panel at the New York Anime Festival 2008. Essentially it’s a video of a panel discussion held by anime bloggers JPMeyer, DS and Hinano on blogging about anime and topics related to it. While reading this critical post I must ask you to keep in mind that my purpose isn’t to make fun of anyone or that I’d think of this sort of publicity for the blogging scene as something negative – far from it! It is delightful to see fellow bloggers to spread the word about what we do to the public. Now considering this, let me commence with some critical view on the panel – not to ridicule but to offer some (hopefully) constructive feedback.
The panel discussion starts with little introduction on the panelists themselves – I think whether this is a positive or negative thing depends on the viewer – but I would have appreciated more explanation on their background and what they do. However just recently I was unfortunate enough to visit a certain industry panel related to my field of study where the introductions took so long that the discussion itself had no more than five minutes time left.
What I can note within the first five minutes is the lack of anything really solid that a potential new blogger can grab onto. Instead there is a lot of techy talk on different blogging platforms and services (why so much explanation on the importance of being able to export your blog database?), although the powerpoint slide does a rather good job at listing examples of what to avoid and what is recommended. JPMeyer obviously has a lot to say, but he seems to completely overestimate the audience and uses language too difficult to understand to general audience. If the target audience of the panel was people with existing knowledge in anime blogging, this wouldn’t be much of an issue. But as far as I have understood (and please correct me if I am wrong!) the panel is supposed to guide and inspire people with very little, if any, understanding on the subject.
On the topic that surely interests many people, how to get traffic on a new blog, the slide show gives a nice list of example services; however, the panelists themselves treat the topic as common knowledge. Now let me remind you, most randomly chosen people have little idea on what feeds and aggregators are or how they work! They could be explained simply in a few words, but this is completely ignored by the panelists. In my opinion this is a bad mistake, because undoubtedly it will leave a lot of people wondering what these services actually do to get you the pageviews.
At 10 minute mark there has been rather good explanation on how to network with bloggers and accumulate some pageviews, as well as utilizing search engines, but the basics of the basics have not been touched much at all. If this is supposed to educate the average person on blogging, I do not think the panel has been doing all that good job. The panelists seem to have been drawn by their own enthusiasm and knowledge into getting stuck in details and talking too techy for much anyone else to understand. Look, it’s nice to know about the fine stuff in blogging such as co-blogging circles and exporting blog databases when moving to another host but the way I see it, that’s not what a greenhorn in anime blogging is primarily interested in. It’s like in the military, you have to keep everything simple or people will either not understand, or even bother to try understanding. Although I must say that whenever DS talks, he talks good stuff. In my opinion he should have had more active role in the discussion instead of JPMeyer who really needs to let the other panelists to have their say as well.
The panelists do answer the audience questions in a way that I’d say is satisfactory. However, I must point out that things could be said in a lot less complex and long way. This applies especially to JPMeyer. He really should have been a bit less passionate at talking (there are three of you behind that table for a reason, a panel isn’t supposed to be a monologue!) and definitely prepared his use of language more. Despite my best efforts, I simply could not ignore his massive overuse of the word ‘like’ whenever talking. Now I do understand that this is a common problem with people having speeches, but it’s not all that hard to get rid of once you become aware of the habit. Leaving that aside, JPMeyer simply had too much passion and enthusiasm, enough to forget about the audience and their level of understanding on the matters at hand. DS on the other hand had a lot of things to say whenever he decided to express himself but he should have been more assertive. He was clearly the one with most experience in communication but did not utilize this to the full extent. JPMeyer, at least let the other panelists have their say! A panel discussion with just one panelist dominating the whole thing is not interesting to watch and much less informative. As for other matters, I think the video editor could have included the audience questions as subtitles because for the most part they were pretty much impossible to hear.
Despite all this criticism I recognize this panel as a step forward to us bloggers. While it might not have been all that informative to those thinking of starting a blog, it did give a picture of what blogging is like and the panelists used personal experiences effectively to get their points through. Just to make things sure, I will remind you once again: This criticism isn’t a personal attack towards anyone, but something that I would like to be considered as constructive.