I'm surprised this thread hasn't been updated much lately, considering Kago had just spent some time in Los Angeles again recently (as well as that Mechaike appearance with the pig).
She was pretty much the first Hello! Project member I've seen in action, ironically years before I knew who Morning Musume was. Back when I was studying Japanese in college I would regularly watch Japanese TV shows imported to a local station, one of those shows being "Kochira Hon Ikegami Sho", featuring Aibon as the main character's daughter...at the time, though, I only knew her as a kid actress with a weird name (I didn't know "Ai" was a popular name back then) and weird teeth, not paying much attention to her otherwise.
Once I started getting into H!P this year I learned more about her, such as her time in Minimoni (the first element of H!P I ever really learned about, though mainly because of Mari Yaguchi's height, Mika Todd being American, and the Dramatic Chipmunk), as well as the whole smoking problem and related aftermath (which made me feel a lot of sympathy towards her). It was a weird shock when I learned that I had actually seen her before in the aforementioned TV show and that I had been unknowingly following the career of Morning Musume through her.

It's good to see her remain active outside of H!P, though honestly speaking I wasn't really feeling those songs she put out this year (possibly due to my own biases with music).
She's probably my third favorite of all of the current and former MM members, behind Yossy and Takahashi...I like to call that my "visual top 3": a pair of "Ai"s and
Hitomi, the Japanese word for "eyes".

Definitely looking forward to see how the upcoming Friday DVD and the Hana Oni movie turn out.
One last thing: does anyone know whatever happened to that whole American school thing she was trying out? Her blog dedicated to it hasn't been updated in a while and I don't think her other blogs have made mention of it recently if at all (why she has 3 blogs featuring similar content is another mystery).