At Buzzscope, Tania del Rio gives her take on the new Tokyopop website. Like many of us, she was startled to click on the “manga” button and find fan art, not catalog entries. But she adjusted, and since she wrote the column, Tokyopop has also redesigned the site to make the books easier to find.
Tania puts her finger on something else that’s not quite right:
I guess the site also weirds me out a bit for the same reason MySpace does. Kids posting photos of themselves online always makes me fear for them slightly. I can’t help but feel anxious about those unsavory characters who might be prowling the web, particularly unsavory characters who also happen to like anime and fan service. But then again, that could just be me being an old worrywart.
She’s right. While Matt Nixon of Tokyopop described the site to me as a safe place where people of all ages could go to talk about manga, without some moderation there’s always the possibility of things going awry. Last week my daughter, who is 13, registered on the site so she could read the online manga. Within a few minutes, she got several requests from total strangers to “friend” her. Being a smart girl, she was bothered by this and stopped using her account. (She uses mine; nobody wants to friend me because I’m too old.)
Tania has plenty of good things to say about the site as well. She appreciates the columns, the reader-submitted manga, and the sense of community it has created among the younger fans. But, she says,
I guess I just wish that the whole fan element was kept slightly separate from the corporate side of the website. I’d like to go to the TOKYOPOP website for clear information about upcoming releases, press releases, appearances, etc. and then visit a separate area for all the fan art, blogs and message boards.
Hear, hear! Still, I agree with her here, too:
By putting their fans first, they are going to create a lasting relationship that will surely benefit the company in the end.
Tania del Rio hits on most of the things I dislike about the Tokyopop site: the counterintuitive navigation bars, the sheer volume of boosted artwork, the MySpace “befriend me” aspect, and the lack of information about their own products on the home page. But I think she’s right about the site’s role in promoting loyalty among younger readers. Looking through the blogs, l33t and all, it’s clear that users are developing the kind of loyalty to Tokyopop’s franchises that companies in other industries would envy.
As a fellow cyber-fogie (at 30+), I share her concerns about the site’s safety. I wish Tokyopop was monitoring site content more carefully. Stolen artwork is a huge problem, of course, but I’ve seen postings in other sections that genuinely disturbed me, including a blog entry coaching girls on how to conceal anorexia from parents and a paraphrase of Rush Limbaugh’s rationale for banning Mexican immigrants from the US. One solution would be to recruit a few site users to screen flagged content for Tokyopop’s administrator, a strategy that many company/publication-sponsored forums use. But frankly, anything would be better than the Wild West atmosphere that currently prevails on the site.
I agree. It’s as if they unlocked the doors and went home.
Another problem is that there doesn’t seem to be any way to make the equivalent of a friendslist, so I have to sort through all the kid stuff to find serious bloggers. I’m just now adding some Tokyopop bloggers to my RSS feeds so I can keep track of them. I’m about to post about this, but I’ll say it here too: Now that Tokyopop is requiring their editors to have blogs, it would behoove them to make those blogs easy to find. Otherwise it’s wasted effort.
It would be helpful to have some way of ranking or classifying blogs. Like everyone who wants to throw out a question, fine, but have a single queue for those types of blogs. Then the grownups can go read their blogs in peace.
Amen to the blog classification suggestion. It would be great to have a simple mechanism for keeping tabs on the few people actually blogging at TP, including the editors. With so much noise, many of the editors’ blogs are disappearing into the Fruits Basket miasma. Rob Tokar’s newly launched blog, for example, barely made a ripple, despite his very public declaration of his identity as Editor-in-Chief at Tokyopop.
You’re right—I missed it.
*goes off to rummage around some more*