Art not made officially by staff of a manga or animation would be the best way to describe fan art. That’s much different than saying art made by people or fans since staff or authors also make their own not so official art. What would you consider that since not all of their illustrations and works may be from series they worked on? They are more than a simple fan and some images they share may also be official ones.

The fact is many people believe it’s fine to take an image off of another blog that was taken from Anime News Network that got it from an official site or announcement to post on a discussion forum. It takes money and effort to get a digital camera and scanner to produce images from real life objects not previously added to the net. This brings me to a good supporting point of how the Internet is. If you make anything creative and share it publicly on the net, what do you expect everyone to do? Not saying it’s okay to be a jerk, but not everyone using fan art has a malicious intent and the uploader should know the possibility of others using their work without permission.

Human beings like recognition and linking to their image account or site shows you support them, however, don’t assume all artists are upset when they see their work used without permission. They may simply enjoy knowing someone liked their art enough to use. This being said, not all sites have field or detail areas when uploading a image and other sites may not be focused on comments and image details. Then what?

The best the artist can do is add a watermark or sign their name and put a notice where images are displayed that you wish to be linked to or asked before having an image used. The best blogger, graphic creator, or web disigner can do is link back, ask, or ask around for the source if unknown. One thing you can learn to do is add the artist or source name when saving an image so you can remember and so that some image hosts may keep that file name in the url or details page. Or just don’t upload at all…any of you.

Besides, people like to be able to find more. On a semi-related note, this community does have a link directory for anime and manga illustration and our gallery does have a copyright area.

Opera has just announced a fairly huge new feature in their new version of their web browser. You can host sites and files from your computer and browser easily. Of course you’d have to have your computer and Opera running for it to work, but it’s easy and free.

Even though you have to create an account of sorts to get urls, Opera claims there is privacy. That’s actually the point of this. We all know how so many of us anime and manga fans download illegally and legally. I wonder if the developers of Opera are counting on this to be abused in order to make the browser popular or if there’s a way to report abuse. Either way this will be used for images or…media. Hope you have a fast net connection.

Click here to view likely one of the most amazing and refreshing sites for web design. It’s a social bookmarking site that’s much like Digg, Furl, or Reddit. It’s focus however is on showing off websites or pages with unique and amazing coding or looks. Many feature Flash and others range from the simple to the complex. Straightline Bookmarks is fairly English friendly since it has English, images link to the site, and some of the linked to sites are also in English if not in mulitple langauges. There’s actually more to Straightline which can be seen on the homepage. Hopefully the site can get enough attention and users to become much larger and diverse.

Wikipedia is a wonderful site for information despite the spoilers. It’s best used when you’re writing when you don’t wish to spend time creating a summary or telling some of the readers something they already know. It’s not so helpful when used to explain for you everything you wanted to say. Wikipedia isn’t perfect and nobody is saying that Wiki sites shouldn’t be used or linked to. Many anime and manga pages contain episode summaries on the main page or carelessly drop spoilers. Perhaps it’s the Wiki user’s fault or maybe that’s how the largest encyclopedia site wishes to be, but it’s something to think about before linking, though.

One other issue is giving credit to Wikipedia for information when there’s sources you can link to instead provided by the site itself. It would surely help other sites get some nice attention, too.

I have had series like Bokurano almost ruined, but it does make up for it with the epic CLAMP versus Clamp debate when users were deciding if the mangaka group should be all caps. At the moment it is Clamp. Maybe let CLAMP decide?

WebClap.com is a Japanese site that offers a special download that you can add to your website. Basically it’s a feature that a user can click showing they like the site, then allows them to enter text. You can then analyze how many many claps you get when and what they liked about the site. The idea was to replace having to put up your email or adding a forum for such. Perfect for a blog, illustration, or personal graphic site. Many anime illustration and 4 panel manga sites use it.

You can also customize the page that they thank you on. There you would likely have an image telling them thanks. There’s a free and paid version, the paid giving a tiny bit more freedom. Other features include email forwarding, IP tracking, and word filtering in where the message is rejected. You can also have Web clap created and hosted by Webclap.com with the parent site SimpleCGI.

Small shounen sites and female webmasters use them rather often. Nearly all of them are from your standard anime graphic and web layout resource site. They’re also known as Hentai Free Badges and there’s also an occasional yaoi one. Huge gap between the whole boy love fan and the fanservice junky. Notice the words yaoi fangirl weren’t used.

Image by Blissful Memoirs
This trend isn’t going anywhere fast, it’s pretty much dead. Active anime design sites aren’t paying such graphics any attention. Download, stream, forum, and other big anime themed sites have neglected this. People new to anime, young, or not into such anime and manga would take comfort in a site making it clear that they don’t allow it. If you don’t have such content, find space for a badge.