Some time in late 90s I read a then-fresh paper by developers of NUMA at Sun Micro. They lamented how in their heart of hearts they knew that NUMA would triumph in the end, but every time journos proclaimed the death of SMP, the boys of SMCC would roll out another SMP that beat the pants of everything SGI. This continued for so long that NUMA adherents became a kind of a joke, even after AMD era (NUMA factor 1.3). [1]
I imagine that early proponents of team blogs (such as Impz and Riex) felt the same when myself and others continued to defy what they saw as a law of nature. Indeed, a team blog with a good governance is nigh-immortal. As long as it remains relevant, it continues to accrete readers and turns into a powerhouse that no Chizumatic can touch, or so goes the plan. The ad impression money to follow.
Still, the team blog vision in animeblogging was long in coming, and only recently I noticed them picking up, with some casualities along the way. RIUVA went with a wimper, Oi Haiyaku cratered with a bang. But never fear, legions of new team leaders came in TJ's and Riex's stead.
There was always "Team" in "Sea Slugs", but in practical terms it always was Kabitzin's blog. Last year, he became serious about teamblogging, by scoring a few high-profile additions such as Zyl and Otou (no disrespect to old slugs Jesus and Epi intended). What really kind of amazes me is how Kabitzin remains as disinclined technically as he was back in the days of trackback problems. The blog is hosted at a shared hosting (!) with Surpass (!!), which had a DNS outage a few days ago because hey, who needs distributed nameservers, right? I like the content at Sea Slugs, Kabitzin shows no sign of burnout, and it looks like the ancient and storied blog is having a bright future.
Metanorn's origins are a mystery to me. It arrived to my OPML list a fully formed teamblog already. I think it was born somewhere in deep alleys of an Asian megalopolis, from the belly of Kokidokom. In 2010, Metanorn moved to a separate domain. The defining feature of them, I think, is a specific interest in anime music (mostly pirated, sadly). Music is a difficult subject for animebloggers, you cannot screencap it. Metanorn approaches it by chasing torrents relentlessly and critiquing the freshest stolen goods on the Internet. They also boast the biggest team.
CSW's claim to fame is an attempt to find a slot in the quality pyramid that is above ANN's reviews just enough to retain readers, but sufficiently low to find enough writers and keep the posts flowing thick. In short, CSW basically have no editorial standards. Their KnT S2 post opens with "anyways, uhm its basically a recap from kurumis POV so it mainly covers the parts with kurumi from [..]" (capitalization and punctuation are original). What's interesting though, they started as a normal blog, but obviously made a conscious decision to outcompete normal blogs with the tabloid approach. The change was shocking.
The THAT is the only still-prominent teamblog that survived a succession (from Impz to Crusader). The degree of success was about the same as in the succession of Omni by Divine, at about the same time, and both sprouted from Animeblogger.net. THAT was not a 20-post-a-day machine in 2010, but continued to be widely linked and quoted. They also tend to compensate with tl;dr.
NKDS comes last on the list as they just could not keep it together after the rename from Naka-Dashi ("Internal Ejaculation"). I tend to think of them as a teamblog being lifted by the raising tide of teamblogs. Sorry, Bj0rn, but you really need to do better than this. Good luck in 2011! Don't overdose on figures!
UPDATE: Kabitzin replies:
It’s interesting that Author dings SSAB for shared hosting at Surpass when 3 of the 5 blogs he names use shared hosting at Surpass. What’s up with that?
My standards are different for different classes of blog. Granted Surpass is not the worst, it's just the recent outage that made me check. Plus I'm fresh from seeking secondary NSes for zaitcev.us. I admit, it is kind of a pain in the neck. Note that CSW is hosted at Dreamhost. It is all relative!
UPDATE MOAR: Right on cue, WAH started a team blog too. Looks like a better edition of Eastern Standard.
[1] When SPARC died and Sun unravelled, the classic NUMA was displaced by cluster computing in HPC and low-factor AMD-style offerings in common servers. Talk about the letdown!