Miku Hatsune: the virtual singer

Japanese Schoolgirl Watch: A Sweet-Sounding Software App Climbs the Charts

Reuters: Boy cafes, sexy comics feed Japan's girl geek boom

Check this out:
Boy cafes, sexy comics feed Japan's girl geek boom

Hare Hare Yukai Dance

"Hare Hare Yukai" is the most popular dance among anime fans in 2007. It is from the ending song of anime "The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya". The dance was performed by fans from ALL OVER THE　WORLD!!!

Other reports on Otaku

Otaku: Japan's Consumer Fanatics (BusinessWeek)

Anime Fantasy Is Big-Biz Reality (BusinessWeek)

--

WIRED: Japan, Ink: Inside the Manga Industrial Complex

This is the cover of November '07 Issue of WIRED magazine
To read the cover story:
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/15-11/ff_manga


--

2007 New York Anime Festival Photos

and cosplay here:

One day in Akihabara

Akihabara, aka Akiba, is the paradise for otaku in Tokyo.
The following link is going to take us to a photo blog of Akiba.
This is the first day of Comiket (comic market) festival last winter. There were 140 thousands attendees that day. After attending the festival, a lot of otaku walked around the street in Akiba...

http://www.akibablog.net/archives/2007/12/c73-akiba-071230.html


--

Fan Fictions

Fan Fictions is literally fictions written by fans.
In English websites, the categories of fan fictions could range from TV shows (such as The X Files) to movies, cartoons. Obviously, the category of anime/manga is now a very popular one.

Link to fan fictions:
FanFiction.Net

Otaku

“The otaku, the passionate obsessive, the information age's embodiment of the connoisseur, more concerned with the accumulation of data than of objects, seems a natural crossover figure in today's interface of British and Japanese cultures. I see it in the eyes of the Portobello dealers, and in the eyes of the Japanese collectors: a perfectly calm train-spotter frenzy, murderous and sublime. Understanding otaku-hood, I think, is one of the keys to understanding the culture of the web. There is something profoundly post-national about it, extra-geographic.”
--- Gibson, William. "Modern boys and mobile girls" The Observer 2001