Thursday, March 11, 2010

I'm Launching an AKB News Only Site

When I started this blog, my goal was to start a site where the casual or new fan can learn about AKB and how AKB does things. This is especially important as the fanbase is increasing by huge numbers. Besides this, I was thinking a few sprinkles of other stuff like opinions and feature stories. I've been pretty much doing that and have about a dozen or more posts in my mind, but one thing I've been thinking about are news about AKB. Current events would be for more hardcore fans or fans that have been around for quite a while, which is quite different from the original target audience. Then again, new fans eventually do become well acquainted fans.

One problem about delivering AKB news is that I just started learning Japanese, so most news I would get would be from other english sites and forums, and since creating a whole post for info that could have been taken and was taken elsewhere wasn't very appealing for me (as the content wouldn't be very original, plagiarism, blah, blah, blah), I decided to just add "News Bits" to my sidebar. My problem with that is they aren't archived, so new fans who would like to trace certain events in the past wouldn't have access to them when I remove them from my News Bits column. So goes with releases of AKB merchandise, which are also present in my sidebar.

News are available in other sites and forums, but besides those, they are also full of many other things. Not everyone has the time to go through all threads and blogposts if they only want to read about what's new about AKB. So I came up with the idea of starting a separate site that contains only news. Separate so people looking for only the news don't have to go through my other posts in this site, and also solves the archive problem of my News Bits. (I may still preserve those News Bits on my sidebar though.) But how about the plagiarism thingy? The idea is that each post will contain only a headline / title / intro and then a link as to where to read the details of the news. So each post would be minimal. So people can only further read about topics they actually are interested in. Think of it as a newspaper with links to AKB news found on other sites, for people who want to read only the news. Obviously, the other sites would contain opinions and comments, but my news site itself will at least give the reader an idea of what's new. For example, the news site would say, "AKB releases 2nd compilation album." It may mention a few more details, but if the reader would like to read more about it, they have to click on the link and read about details there. So it follows the concept of my current News Bits by giving headlines and gives the option to readers to read more from external sources. And since it's archived, fans who haven't checked on AKB for a while can check for what have happened since they last checked.

What's the difference between that site and this? Think of that as a newspaper, and this as a magazine. Also, this is a resource for new fans who want to learn about AKB, since that info is quite hard to dig up from other sites too, and since when I was new, I thought a site like this would be very helpful.

So, check it out: http://newsakb.blogspot.com

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