Theme based reviews are the way of the future, at least for dumbotaku.com. As you may have noticed it has been a bit quite around here since the site split. Unfortunately it is mostly due to having no real goals for the site other than “reviews and otaku culture” type posts.

Reviews are all fine and good, and a lot of fun. However, doing random reviews kind of sucks for me because I don’t know what is review worthy or not, odd problem I know.

So starting this month I am going to do theme based reviews. Every month is a new theme for reviews, and one post per week.

This months theme is going to be Movies.

I have several ideas for what to do reviews on so now it is a matter of getting through them in a timely manner.

All that said What are your ideas?

Please leave a comment with your ideas for themes. As you might have noticed I am not binding myself to genre, but am actually open to almost any type of theme.

Thanks for the help and I can’t wait to see some of the ideas.

It has been a year since this blog was started, and has been an exciting ride to say the least. Since the beginning of the blog and January 1 are so closed together I think I’ll just join the two post themes as they are pretty much the same thing.

Lets start with the top posts of this last year.

Top Posts of 2009

1. Online Japanese Music Radio Stations
2. How to Learn Japanese
3. 5 Ways to Use Subtitles to Learn Japanese
4. Who Are the Ainu
5. Top 10 Japanese Tongue Twisters
6. Japanese Verb Conjugation Te-Form
7. Butt Attack Punisher Girl Gotaman
8. Kenichi the Mightiest Disciple English Audio First Impressions
9. Top 9 Japanese Language Blogs
10. 5 Centimeters Per Second First Anime I Didn’t Like

Top Post Thoughts

I’ll tell you a couple of these are a bit odd to have at the top. I am curios where so many people hear about “Butt Attack Punisher Girl Gotaman”. I know the Anime World Order podcast did a review, but I can’t imagine it is all from them.

The others I can see, but the Kenichi really makes me wonder too about where the advertising is for it. I really am curios where people see advertisements or hear about this anime from because I never hear about it from anyone but myself.

Stats of 2009

• February: 672
• March: 978
• April: 1,497
• May: 7,495
• June: 6,575
• July: 5,774
• August 8,126:
• September: 8,186
• October: 9,546
• November: 10,544
• December: 8,210

262 RSS Subscribers

Stats Thoughts

I started out doing pretty low traffic numbers, but am excited at how well I did for my only real advertising being via twitter, but what really threw me up high in April, and I have to give credit to my Japanese teacher for, was the Top 10 Japanese Tongue Twisters. I had asked if she knew them and she later came back with a printout of them, from goo. It was linked to on a site from Hungary and got over 1100 pageviews in one day. From there things went fairly well traffic wise since Google finally noticed me at that point.

On the subscriber count I’ll be honest that I am amazed at how many I got in 1 years time. I don’t know how I got so high to be honest. I know that I got 50 or so from alafista linking me, but the rest I am not to sure. I am every so thankful and appreciative people think my site is nice enough to even subscribe to. If you don’t know what RSS is please read this post to find out more A Primer on RSS.

General Thoughts

First I want to say thank you to all those who have visited and commented it means a lot to me. When I first started I had no idea how long I was going to blog for or even how useful I could/it would be. Since people felt enough to leave comments, subscribe, and revisit I take it I was able to be of some use.

Content wise I didn’t know how long this blog could go before I started I was asking others to co-author the blog with me because I didn’t know if I could ever come up with enough content or good content. Things started off rocky for the first few months, but around June or July I found some focus and a direction to take things and that is where quality started going up from readers hopefully because the blogs quality went up.

2010 Goals

It has been an adventure and I have learned a lot about blogging. However, this is only the beginning I feel confident since it has been a year that there is no reason not to continue. So here are a couple of goals for the next year in no particular order.

• Continue to improve quality of content
• Try to build a tighter community here and in J-Blogosphere
• Review more books
• Increase readership and subscribers
• Do more history posts

If you have any suggestions or comments good or bad please let me know and leave a comment. I am constantly looking for ways to improve so please help me out if you can.

Learning Site: Learn.DumbOtaku.com

For the last while I have been working on a web application for helping me learn and better do verb conjugation.  I spent sometime putting together a base of a web application for learning and doing many things for learning Japanese.

Here is a quick video on the original concept.  Basically wanted a worksheet to practice with, just decided to take it online and make it programmatic.

Here is a video on how to use the site.

This is just the beginning I have a few more ideas and am always looking for more things to do.  I would like to halfway turn it into a full site of applications and ways to learn Japanese and more of the finer points of the language beyond just the vocabulary. I could keep going, but would rather you just head over and check it out.

Again the site is Learn.DumbOtaku.com

If you have read my post “How to Learn Japanese” then you probably saw a lot of different resources on there.  Unfortunatly, I have no central place to put them at all for easy access by all.  I just kind of let them sit in that post.  Well today my sensei gave me a new resource a friend of hers is working for graduate school.  I have taken a look at it and am impressed.

The site is:

http://studyjp.web.fc2.com/

If you are using the Genki books then this is an excellent resource to utilize.  I am really likeing it as it is a good compliment to other sites and the book.  Getting this site from my sensei is what gave me the idea for the Language Resources page because I needed a place to share links.  So in the future if you need to look for good places to learn stuff maybe try hitting:

Language Resources

It is going to be my goal to make sure if the site dies remove it from the list and to update the list as much as possible when I find new resources.  I have found plenty of lists of sites to learn on that are just massive lists of resources and only half of the links work.  I hope to not run into that problem

If you have any suggestion for a site to add to the list please leave a comment here or on the page or shoot me an e-mail through the contact page.

I am about to leave on a weeks vacation Sunday, but when I get back expect a really cool announcement on something I have been working on and plan to continue to work on with the help of the community.

I have always wanted a character to represent me and my site.  Saw this on locker gnome for Chris Pirillo and to me was the coolest thing ever.  I have always had yet to find a reason to have a character until I decided to get serious about blogging.  So now that I am serious I asked a friend to do some roughing in of a character for me and this is what he came up with.

I’ll be honest this just rocks.  I am so excited about this it is much better than imagined a rough drawing would be.  What do you all think?  This will lead to something larger in the works too.

If you regularly follow me you will know that the last couple of weeks my site has been up and down and up and down and up and down.  Finally, things should be resolved as we some major server changes have been made and should be stable again.  Which means I can get back to posting things I learn and reviews of what I watch.

So please stick around subscribe and lets enjoy some Japanese langauge and culture, that includes anime.