The Aniblog Tournament and Next Time
With my defeat in the quarter-finals (which I totally expected and helped along by voting for Kurogane) as well as the end result of this year’s aniblog tournament in sight, I feel this is a good time to reflect on the Aniblog Tournament and post a couple of suggestions for next year’s aniblog tournament (assuming the organizers will run this tournament again).
I’d first like to thank everyone that voted for me throughout the tournament; I appreciate the support. Even in my loss to Kurogane, I couldn’t believe the number of votes I received. I know some of the votes were made in attempt to get the weaker blog to advance but even discounting those, I received far more votes than I thought was possible.
It felt very surreal to make the final 8 and it left me with conflicting feelings. I have no illusions that I’m one of the top eight blogs in the anime blogosphere but to say it was a fluke would belittle my opponents from the first four rounds which would be wrong. I wasn’t very familiar with my second round opponent, Bokutachi no Blog, third round opponent, Unmei Kaihen, or fourth round opponent, Anime Diet, before the start of this tournament but I now know that they (and bad luck party too) are quality blogs and beating them definitely meant something. However, the ease that Kurogane beat me means that I’m still no where near being one of the titans in the anime blogosphere so I won’t let my performance this time go to my head. 
General Thoughts About the Aniblog Tournament
The Aniblog Tournament was a complete surprise to the vast majority of the anime blogosphere when it started and I was very curious to see how the bloggers and readers would take it. There were so many different ways it could have turned out; it could have been ignored or it could have generated tons of animosity and bitterness between blogs or it could have turned into a big joke after being swamped by fake voting. Instead, the result was very close to the best case scenario and I think that says something good about everybody involved (from the voters to the organizers).
I wasn’t expecting much from my involvement since this tournament was “just a popularity contest” so I felt blindsided when I realized that my participation would yield great unsolicited feedback about what I was doing right and what I needed to improve upon. Some of the suggestions for improvement where things I was privately thinking that I should do but it took someone else pointing it out and the desire to fix these deficiencies before the next round match up to actually get me to fix them.
I also wasn’t expecting to discover new blogs that I should follow but that happened as well. Upon becoming an anime blogger, my intake of anime increased drastically and as a result I radically cut back my anime blog reading. I had less time to read other blogs and my need to read episodic blogs disappeared because I was now watching all the anime that interested me in the slightest. I also stopped checking out new blogs as they started because I liked the mix of anime blogs I followed and didn’t see the pressing need to find more. The product of this mindset was there was a depressing amount of blogs I was not familiar with and before I voted I wanted to make sure I was voting for the “right” blog. (Never call me an uninformed voter in anything.) This lead to discovering blogs like ghostlightning’s where I had previously read a few posts from but never connected these posts together in my mind to tell me that I needed to follow this blog and established blogs like Behind the Nihon Review that I can’t understand how I missed in the past and newer blogs like Scamp’s that I found having an interesting author/style of writing behind it.
For “just a popularity contest”, I think the Aniblog Tournament did a great deal of good.
Suggestions for the Next Aniblog Tournament
I was very happy with how this tournament was set-up but I thought of a couple tweaks that I think could improve next year’s aniblog tournament (assuming and hoping there is one).
I like the general format of the tournament, how it has 96 spots for blogs and gives a first round bye to the stronger blogs, but using a set number will always mean some blogs are left out or there’ll be not enough blogs to fill the required spots. The best solution, I think, is to have a round zero where all the blogs not getting first round byes are put into different pools – I was thinking 8 – and the top 8 vote getters in a poll of that pool would be used to seed the first round match-ups.
Another needed change is to publish the tournament bracket early, giving the voters time before the start to review blogs they’re unfamiliar with and to allow bloggers time to prepare their blogs to look and read their best. (And allow any blogs to opt out if they so desire.) Assuming the my first suggestion is implemented the added time could be used for feedback to ensure no anime blog gets left out. For example, next year around mid-February, the initial bracket with the blogs getting first round byes could be published along with the proposed list of participants in the various pools. People could then mention anime blogs that were not included that they feel should by included and a revised listing of the pools would be published about 7-10 days before the start of March. Then on March 1st, the polling would commence on the pools and by the middle of March the winners would be known and placed into the tournament bracket. From there, people would have a couple of weeks to read and/or prepare for the start of the tournament on April first.
I also thought trimming the matches from 7 days to 5 days was a good idea and wonder if it could be shortened to 4 days.
I have seen the suggestion somewhere else that editorial and episodic blogs be segregated more in their pairing next time. I think the idea is tempting but ultimately not a sound one. Yes, they are completely different types of blogs but one can still measure how much value reading a certain blog gives to oneself independently of the content of the blog. And looking over all the match-ups, I don’t see the editorial blogs doing that badly anyways.
Completely Off the Subject
Though I don't like how the game makers elected to hide Germany's true flag for the game.
The lack of anything new on The Null Set recently can be attributed to my decision to pick up a game called Hearts of Iron 3 and the insane difficulty it’s taking to learn how to play. I didn’t expect this game to be this difficult to get after playing so many games of the same genre but it is and trying to figure it out has been taking up a lot of space in my brain. I’m at the point now that the game is starting to make sense and becoming fun to play. If you’re wondering, it’s a strategy game set between the years 1936 – 1948 and the player can pick any country to play out WW2 or an alternative WW2. In my game, I’m playing one of Chinese political factions and so far I’ve been able to reunite China, push Japan off the Asian continent then invaded and conquered Japan turning myself into the Asian superpower. And in Europe, Germany started the war like normal but then invaded Spain and England. And America finally joins the war in mid-1942 (no Pearl Harbor to bring it in sooner) and invades/frees Norway from Germany. At the present moment, England is trying to convince the Chinese Empire to become an Allied power but I’m being tempted by the largely undefended Allied holdings in Asia (India, Indonesia, etc.) not to join, though, the idea of a European invasion by the Chinese Empire to save England, France, etc. is almost too absurd to pass up.
Completely Off the Subject 2
My younger sister graduated high school this year and for her party, last week, she wanted to rent a farmhouse in Amish country and spend her time shopping and relaxing. At night I marveled, once again, about how awesome the stars look outside of the city and decided to see if I could take a picture of them. A tripod would have been extremely helpful but I did get a couple nice pictures.
If you look at the full size pic you can see it's the Big Dipper
Thanks for the suggestions! You definitely have my agreement on some of them.
As the tourney’s gone on, a couple thoughts have popped into my mind about the setup.
1.) The tourney is too long
2.) There’s more excitement when more blogs are still involved
If I were to redo the bracket, I’d probably cut the # of blogs down to 64, reduce the length of voting time, and find a way to give each blog a chance to get at least 2 matchups, whether it’s double elimination, or by creating a consolation bracket.
I’d also consider placing the top 8 or 16 in a “boss level” type of setting to try to minimize some of the early lopsided type of matches. Thankfully, we now have a more concrete idea of who the top 8 or 16 should be in the next go around.
Thanks for the mention and I’m glad you discovered us! We’re a humble blog, so you’re not the only one that’s gone: “I’ve never heard of these guys.” I can’t speak for the others over at NHRV, but I found your blog through the tourney as well.
I definitely think the AniBlog tourney is a bit long… 4-5 day matches would be great. But I’m not sure if giving people extra time to read blogs will really work out. Seems to me like if we’re talking about two blogs people don’t know, they probably won’t feel the impetus to check out the blogs until the actual voting time. I’d say maybe only fellow bloggers would be able to really use that extra time to read up.
But I think the idea of a round zero might work, especially if we allow multiple votes per person (like 4), so that out of the group, a full 8 can move on as you proposed. The only problem is that you’d have to incorporate a way to add in the blogs that aren’t originally included in the 8 groups, which would mean that each bracket would be unbalanced. Say, one group has 12, but another has 14, so 8/12 is a higher percentage than 8/14.
Otherwise, good ideas! And by Amish country, do you mean Pennsylvania?
Problem with having large pools of 8 is twofold. One is that, when faced with 8 blogs to choose from, how many people will actually view all the blogs in question? The other is imagine how crappy the person who finished at the bottom of those 8. We’re not exactly in the business of keeping inflated bloggers ego’s intact but neither do we exactly want to crush them into the ground.
Lowering the time of each match is a good idea but I think the amount of time that will be shaved off the length of the tourney is very negligable. Consider the first two round lasted about 20 days each. This would mean the number is reduced to 18 days, not an awful lot. Still, every little bit helps.
Definatley need to publish the bracket first. Thing is, we were living off the original hype during the first few round of matches, but I think the trade-off to be better organised is definately better.
@RP
I strongly disagree with cutting down the number further, seeing as even with our 96 there were still 10-15 blogs that fufilled the criteria to be entered but were overlooked. As for length, I think we’re right on the edge and definately can’t make it any longer. Remember that just because some areas of the blogosphere have lost interest, the interest from lurkers has increased judging by the amount of votes the latest rounds are getting. Personally I think the problem is with the gaps between a small amount of games towards the latter rounds. My suggestion would be to have 3/4 way matches towards the end. This was not only will egos not be hurt (they’ve already reached this far) but the time will be shaved off. Plus the blogs that will reach that far will probably be well known to most people so you don’t have to worry about having to visit each blog in question
Thanks for the mention and I hope you enjoy reading further. I wasn’t the best of participants in that I often voted when I knew the competitors and often I didn’t give the other party a chance.
Nonetheless I discovered a few new sites as well, and the tourney gave me a good nudge to finally improve my site’s look.
It’s kind of cool that I could see the big dipper from my bedroom window for a good part of the year (I’m from the Philippines), great pic though.
I think the tournament should have the previous tournament’s top5 blogs to be the judges of each tournament rather than each round being decided by votes. These judges can decide which blog is better by each match-up and then vote out of five of them whichever blog gets more. That blog would then proceed to the next round.
Then these five blogs would be included in the third/fourth round as a bye from the previous tournament and the judges would be the few good blogs that have been eliminated in the first/second rounds and these guys would be the judges til the final.