Category: Site News

So two years have passed since I created IdolOnChaos. Happy birthday, I guess?

With groups disbanding and others trying to take their place, the idol scene keeps providing stuff to talk about. Sure, this pandemic may have slowed it down a bit, forcing it to focus more on the disbandments, but there is no shortage of new releases and units anyway.

Admittedly, the one who sloed down is actually me, especially since last summer. It’s not that I’m losing interest in writing about idols of course, but I guess that searching for videos and news to upload daily has been stealing some of the time and energy I used to put into writing articles. The good news, however, is that I’m not alone anymore in this project: Cain has been helping a lot writing reviews every week, which is why I managed to relax a bit more. So, a huge THANK YOU to him.

Some more interesting things happened during this second year of activity, like the birth of our Telegram channel; today, to celebrate our second birthday, I want to introduce our official Discord server: join to chat about idols, discover new groups and find people with the same oshi!

And that’s all for now. I hope you have been enjoying IdolOnChaos’ slow but steady growth, and with the Discord server now you’ll be able to be more into it; also, don’t forget that we are still searching for people who wants to work with us.

So here’s to another year full of idol content (and maybe new columns, who knows…)!

It’s been a while since the last announcement. Well, there won’t be any big announcements this time, just some ideas I want to share. Since there are no announcements, it’s obvious that nothing has changed on IdolOnChaos in these past weeks. But I’d like to make some changes, or actually, some improvements of this project.

Let’s start by the main problem: great ideas are cool, but usually require people to get developed properly. Right now, I’m handling almost everything on IdolOnChaos, except for the two collaborations (Idol Underworld and JROCK’N’ROLL) which, incidentally, helped me create some of the most interesting content on this website. In any case, I’m working almost daily on the site, whether it’s to add news, videos or writing articles and stuff. There are already some sections which are kinda neglected, which made me realize that if I want to make this project bigger, I can’t do that alone. And I believe there is some potential in IdolOnChaos.

So the big idea is to get some help from you. Yes, you, human being who is reading this announcement. I wanted to make the classic we want you poster with an idol instead of the good old Uncle Sam, but I’m too lazy to do that, so try to imagine it.

There are many big and small activities you can help with, and any help — even the tiniest — would be appreciated. Even if you don’t have that much free time to spend here, but would still love to help out, it’s ok, as long as you put the basic effort to do it right.

Depending on the activities you want to do, you would of course be required to have certain skills. The only basic skills absolutely required is speaking a somehow understandable form of English. So, even if the website has an Italian section, you don’t need to be Italian; especially because probably soon I will make the website English-only. So just tell me you love pizza and you can work with me.

The cool thing is that you’ll be even more into the whole idol thing. Depending on what you do, you may also get the chance to do something with your favorite group (like an interview). For interesting activities like interviews and similar stuff, anyone in the team who wants to contribute will be free to do it.

Another important note: as much as I try to work professionally, IdolOnChaos is still a hobby. So I’m not earning anything, at least for now (who knows, in the future…). Of course, I’d like you to consider this as a hobby too, meaning that there is no chance of getting paid. However, I’m putting some money in this project, but I won’t ask you to contribute — this is my project, after all. Of course, if you’d like to do it I’d be grateful and it would allows us to do more stuff, but it won’t be required to join the IdolOnChaos team.

So I’ll try to list the current activities and the ideas I also want to work on in the future (or even now, if someone can handle them). If you think you can help out, just send me a message anywhere; even if you don’t have any experience in this kind of stuff, don’t worry: after ten years in another webzine, I guess know how things work and I’ll help you learning how to do your job.

Current Activities

• Reviews & Articles: this kind of stuff takes some time, and you would surely need to speak English decently to do it.
• Photo galleries creation and update: this is something that would need to be done quite often, or at least more than once every three months like I’m doing. It’s a simple activity, when you don’t have a lot of other stuff to do.
• Spotify playlists: again, this one is quite simple too, and it’s not even something I think that needs to be done that often.
• Translations: right now, doing written interviews is a pain, especially since my Japanese is not that great. Of course, you’d need to know both Japanese and English to do this.
• Idol-Tube videos: especially for the live category, it would be cool if you could add some videos every now and then. It takes literally five minutes to add one.
• News: it takes a bit more than five minutes, and it needs to be done daily (or at least whenever something interesting happens).
• Social Media: 99% of the posts on social medias are automatically created, but posting more stuff (especially on Twitter) would be great.
• E-mail management: this would consist mainly in contacting idol groups to work with them on interviews and stuff. Of course, you need to speak Japanese.

New Activities

• YouTube: well, I have this YouTube channel and right now I’m using it only for the Know Your Idol interviews. How about creating more content? Just to list some ideas: weekly/monthly updates on the idol scene, in-depth videos on certain groups, other kind of videos, etc. Also live streaming stuff may be another option.
• Know Your Idol 2.0: what I can say here is I don’t even know. But I’d like to expand the concept of “Know Your Idol” and create more videos with idols to help people know more about them.
• Instagram: probably the social media I hate the most, since they made it impossible to automate anything, but that’s another story. Anyway, creating stories, reels and that kind of stuff may be a good way to attract more people, but I still don’t know what kind of content we could put there.
• Podcasts: I thought of this one literally five seconds ago, but people love podcasts recently, so why not?
• Translations (yes, again): we are dealing with Japanese artists, which means that there are lots of ways to use your translation skills. First that comes to mind, interviews aside, is lyrics translation. But I think there may be other things we could do.
• Your ideas: if you have any idol-related idea you would like to develop but don’t know how to do it by yourself, let’s talk about it. Even if you have an idea and would like to suggest it without actually contributing, tell me about it.

Regarding The Future

Ok, so let’s talk a bit about the future of IdolOnChaos.

The main focus of this project is and will always be spreading idol culture outside Japan, especially (but not only) in Europe. After one year and half, many interesting things happened, among which the collaboration with Idol Underworld and the written interviews, mostly made together with JROCK’N’ROLL.

Having a team of passionate people will surely help this project to grow. One single person can do only so much, two people can do a lot more stuff, just think what ten people may be able to do.

Some other people already proved that bringing idol in Europe is possible, so how about we think of doing it in the future? Yes, it’s expensive for everyone and this damn virus is not really helping, but there is also the easier option of live streaming idol shows sponsored by IdolOnChaos. It would have been cool to sponsor some idol shows now that they can’t do them, but right now it’s kinda impossible for me.

Just some ideas, but in any case, if we want to think bigger, we need to make IdolOnChaos bigger. That’s why your help may be the key to do many great things in the future.

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So that’s all for now. Hope that some of you will be interested in doing something together; otherwise, the site will keep going as usual, don’t worry. I’ll leave a contact form below, but you can send a message anywhere (Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram) if you prefer.

It’s been more than one year since I started IdolOnChaos; during this time, there have been mostly minor additions and a few new features, which simply improved the website. This time, I wanted to make some big changes, adding more stuff and improving the current sections. So, here we are… Welcome on IdolOnChaos 2.0! Let’s give a quick glance to the new version of the website.

New Homepage & New Menu

As you may have noticed, the homepage has been heavily updated, of course together with the main menu. Below the list of most recent articles, you will find a new area which includes eight different sections: let’s take this chance to recap all the sections of this website.

Latest News

Following the many events in the unpredictable world of idols may be quite hard. You get distracted for one second, and the next thing you know is that your favorite group lost one member. Or maybe they got a new one, who knows. Anyway, in this area we’ll try to include any important event of the idol scene, so that you’ll always be able to see what your favorite groups are doing.

In addition, the news regarding the website and the latest IdolOnChaos tweets have been moved in this area too.

Idol Birthdays

Wishing your favorite idols a happy birthday is a nice thing to show them how much you appreciate their efforts. This new section will help you not only to remember their birthdays, but to send them a happy birthday tweet as well! You will use your own Twitter account to send the message, IdolOnChaos will only make it a bit easier.

Note: I’m still in the process of adding all the birthdays, there are so many idols out there. There are already many of them though and I will add more as soon as possible.

Idol-Tube

Nothing really new here, except I added a Lyric Videos category which may be useful. Before, the lyric videos were included in the MV category, but since they are different it may be nice to put them in their own category.

Articles

Just a quick recap of the main categories of articles on the website. Clicking on the picture will bring you to that category area.

Idol Playlists

Last year I kinda neglected this category, but I actually want to improve it. To force myself to do it, I decided to give it its own are in the new homepage.

Here you will find the latest playlist embedded in the page and links to the other ones. They are not really many right now, but I want to add more.

Photo Galleries

This area has been heavily changed. First of all, there are two different sub-categories: themed galleries (like the Halloween or Christmas ones) and special galleries (related to a certain event, idol, group or whatever). Themed galleries will also be updated every now and then and will be split by year or sub-theme. The Christmas gallery is the best example of how these gallery will look.

But there is one more gallery which I talked about a few months ago: the IdolOnChaos CD & Merch collection. In this page, you will see pics of the stuff I personally own. I will do my best to update it relatively often, since there are very few pics right now. Anyway, the same pics are also on the Instagram account which you can follow of course.

Know Your Idol

You should already know about this one. In the old version of the homepage, these very cool area wasn’t really present, so I wanted to give it some space. The work we are doing together with Idol Underworld is great and all those idols deserves to be known.

Chika Radar

Last but not least, our beloved Chika Radar got itself some space in homepage too. Discovering new groups is always a nice feeling, that’s why I realized that putting this area in homepage is the right thing to do.

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So this is the big change I did to this site. Some areas may get some small improvements later, but for now I guess it’s already good.