Friday 3 September 2010

Re-obsessed

Friday 3 September 2010
You may remember I joined Obsessed With Film back in May, but left after a month because of erratic progress with their redesign and an unclear direction. "Creative differences", you could say. A few promises were broken and the "vibe" didn't meet expectations. It was partly due to the circumstances of a troublesome revamp that alienated their readership in unexpected ways -- which they addressed in a manner I didn't agree with, so felt it was best to leave amicably.

Since then, OWF have been keen to reacquire my services, having made improvements that's gone down well with their readership, and promising to accommodate my every need. And because I'm still itching for a new challenge (and appreciate editor Matt Holmes's persistent schmoozing!), I've decided to give OWF a second chance, with changes to our original deal and a greased palm.

Once again, I've promised that OWF will get exclusive TV premiere reviews (linked to from DMD, so reviews are never more than a click away). But they won't get regular episode/finale reviews now, except in special circumstances. OWF will mainly get a smattering of daily news, perhaps of broader interest than what I post here (as DMD focuses on my personal tastes). In some instances the news will largely mirror content at DMD, if slightly rewritten.

I hope you'll check out my work at OWF, again. I was pleased to see many of you making the trip to OWF earlier this summer. Your support meant a lot to me. Since the summer, OWF has a better look, a working RSS feed, and there are cool "content switch" tabs that give visitors one-click access to specific articles. That way you can filter out the film content to get at the TV content, or vice versa. Handy, huh?

OWF attracts an incredible 250,000 visitors every month (on average), so the audience there is enormous compared to DMD. It will be great to have my writing read on a larger stage. The only problem OWF has is wheedling comments out of that tight-lipped quarter-million. As a one-man blogger, my visitor-to-comment ratio is far healthier than OWF's -- surprisingly. Maybe that's just how it goes with "personal specialist blogs" versus "websites with multiple writers and broader content"? Is it the personal touch that people value and respond to? I don't know. Thoughts?

That's pretty much it for this announcement. DMD won't suffer too badly from this, because the majority of my writing will always be found here. I'll be linking to most of my OWF articles, too. At the very least, everything OWF-related will be "retweeted" by me on Twitter -- so, that's another incentive to follow me! I'm hoping OWF will bring opportunities that aren't easily achieved at DMD without an exhausting amount of groundwork (like interviews), so that's exciting in itself.

So yes, I'm back for a second attempt, my "contract" renewed month by month this time, so if things collapse I'll go back to giving DMD my full attention. But hopefully that won't happen again!

The fun resumes tomorrow, Saturday 4 September -- check it out!