Once again, if you see me criticizing something about your blog, it’s nothing personal. I tend to tear apart people’s websites when I do comparisons such as this, so just keep that in mind. Sorry for being a tad late with this one. I might be catching up of a few other things later tonight too.
Aniblog Tournament | HTML Bracket
Round 1, Day 9
Match 17: Behind the Nihon Review
Behind the Nihon Review appears to be an exceptionally well written editorial blog, and some of the articles I actually read all the way through (instead of just scanning over them). The design is kind of average, but has some cool aspects to it (like the swirling tag cloud, despite the fact that I typically don’t like tag clouds). Maybe the one minus is that there have only been 6 posts in the month of April. Chocolate Syrupy Waffles certainly has a lot of content, and it looks like they have several authors adding content. However, one thing started to really bug me after a while: there appeared to be absolutely no rhyme or reason as to the formatting of people’s posts or anything. Now, I realize that different authors are going to have different writing styles, but it really got to the point of being distracting, at least to me. I think if CSW was more consistent, I may consider them, but I think this round is going to Behind the Nihon Review.
Match 18: Listless Ink
Listless Ink seemed to stand out right away to me. The blog design is pretty good (and I had to laugh at the chibi RSS and Twitter characters). On top of that, the content on the blog, which looked like was mostly editorial in nature, appeared to be pretty well written and thought out from what I read. Again, perhaps the main minus is posting rate, with only 3 posts in the month. Super Noisy Rice Shower Goes Boom!! is yet another highly specialized type of blogs: in this case, a blog about Japanese seiyuu, specifically. They post reasonably often (9 posts in the month) and while a blog about seiyuu isn’t something I would necessarily personally follow, it’s hard to discount the blog as it is covering something pretty unique. That makes this choice pretty difficult for me, as I really hate to vote against either of these blogs. Going back to one of the original tournament posts, Scamp wrote that “the criteria on which you should decide the winner is which would you prefer to read.” In that case, I would prefer to read Listless Ink, just because I’m personally not really into a blog about seiyuu, so that’s who I’ll go with.
Round 1, Day 10
Match 19: AstroNerdBoy
AstroNerdBoy is mainly an anime episodic review and manga chapter review blog. However, he also blogs some older series, which gives some attention to series that people might have forgotten about. The content of the blog is very good, and he posts, on average, about daily, so you always have something new to read. Perhaps my biggest complaint is the design of the blog. Maybe it’s just me, but the green is almost overpowering. I’m also not quite sure about the episode review format, which the paragraphs wrapping around the images. I think normally it might be fine, but the content area is so narrow that I’m not sure how it works. Maybe flipping the images to the right of the text from the left would help with that some. ek-sen’trik certainly has a better design than ANB, and also does episode reviews, as well as something called SoMT. ek-sen’trik has their own problem with the formatting of their episode posts, as I’ve never really been a fan of the “post an image, post a sentence, post an image, etc” style of posting because I think it breaks things up too much (but maybe that’s just me), and a lot of times, like in this case, you will have to had watched the episode to even know half of what they’re talking about. Meanwhile, the SoMT (or shoujo-only moe tournament) certainly is something creating to give ek-sen’trik points, but I’m not sure how much I’d be into it. I think this one is a close one, but I think AstroNerdBoy will get it because, even though they have flaws, I still like how he does his posts better.
Match 20: GAR GAR Stegosaurus
GAR GAR Stegosaurus is mostly an editorial blog with some pretty good content on it, and they most moderately-frequently (7 posts in April). Once again, maybe my biggest complaint is the design of the site, where the black is almost too overwhelming, but other than that, there isn’t much to complain about. Project Saber certainly has the better design. It appears that they have some posts about first and final impression of series, with posts about figures and things they bought in between. I’m not really sure how to evaluate figure blogging, but it looked like many of the posts were a picture and not much else. I think Project Saber had some good content, I just think GAR GAR has better content.
Round 1, Day 11
Match 21: Blue Blue Wave
Blue Blue Wave has a variety of different post subjects, which I always find to be nice, with at least a plurality of the blogging centered on episode reviews. There really isn’t much to dislike about this blog. A pretty good design, a good category hierarchy which is up front, good content on their posts. Pretty good all around. Maybe the only complaint would be that they don’t really mark when the “recap” portion of their episode reviews stop and when the “review” begins, but it isn’t that big of a deal. My first thought, I’m sad to say, when visiting Fuzakenna! was “what a mess!” when looking at the design, meaning that it pretty much failed my 5-second-test. There doesn’t seem to be very much rhyme or reason where things are placed on the page. Moving to content, it has a lot of interesting content, some of it editorial, some of it more…unique. However, I don’t really think it’s content is better than Blue Blue Wave’s, which it would really need to be to overcome it’s design flaws, for me.
Match 22: Metanorn
This is a match up which has direct implications for this blog, as, well, the winner of this one will be facing off against me. So go vote for whoever you think will do the worst against me. No, no, just kidding.
My initial thought on Metanorn was that it’s design was a little busy, but I guess it’s not too terribly bad. Content wise, it looks like they mostly do episode blogging, with some OST reviews on the side, which is a little different. However, he uses the “pictures, a couple sentences, pictures, a couple sentences, etc.) format as well which I’m not really a big fan of. The fact that they seem to have the same tastes as me helps though, haha. I also like their collapsing category list. A good way of doing it if you have a lot of categories like both of us do. Oishii Anime is set up kind of like a news blog. They have their 365 days of anime characters, which gives them an excuse to have a new post every day, but even despite that, they keep up with blogging about other things reasonably well. Some of it is just first impressions of the season, with some omnibus episode reviews mixed in, though, again, they do the same type format that Metanorn does (though I think Metanorn does write more indepth about the episodes). This one is a close one, but I think on content, I’m giving it to Metanorn.
Round 1, Day 12
Match 23: Cross Channel
I don’t have much time to write something up so I’ll try to be quick. In this one, I think Cross Channel just has overall better content, and they post more frequently, and I don’t see anything on their blow that would make me want to just automatically discount them, so I’m voting for it.
Match 24: Baden Baden Lily
∑Xce7ion has been pretty spotty on posting recently, and their content seemed to be kind of so-so. I’m not really a fan of Baden Baden Lily’s design, and I don’t really like their posting style, but they have more content and actually post regularly, so I’m going with BBL.
