Another crazy week in the movie blogging world, and the future of OWF

Justice League,Star Trek and strike news has been frequent, often shocking and in terms of the strike, effecting every aspect of film production and will no doubt effect our movie going experience in 2009. Yesterday came some really big news that I wasn't expecting. TheMovieBlog announced it was shutting down. John Campea, the editor and owner of the site got offered the job of running Scifimission.com, the latest of the Coming Soon sister sites like their horror one (Shock Till You Drop) and comic book one (Superhero Hype) and he took it, claiming he had taken TheMovieBlog "as far as it could go". Now, I didn't know anything about blogs when I first stumbled across his website back in 2004. My daily website rota would consist of AICN (which ya know, isn't far from being a blog I guess), ComingSoon (which as Campea points out, is THE site for movie news) and Batman on Film. Campea's The Movie Blog was a breath of fresh air. It would cover most of the biggest news in the industry but would have this incredibly vocal voice of a guy who wasn't afraid to let us know of his opinions and then when he started a podcast (again, something I had never heard of until he did it), he really tapped in to something that the web was missing. His podcast was far and away the best podcast on the web for film related discussions and would stay that way for four and a half years, as it grew and added more members to the panel. Soon other websites would grow out of movie fans who wanted to do the same thing and voice their own opinion on the web. Slash Film, Filmstalker (which was branched out from Richard Brunton, who worked on TheMovieBlog for a while) and yes, Obsessed With Film. Yes folks, there was no doubt that Obsessed With Film would not exist if it wasn't for TheMovieBlog but whilst Campea always had a clear idea of what he wanted his site to be like, I would chop and change things around here on a monthly basis since the site started in July 2006. I love Obsessed With Film. I like the community of visitors we have here but I've never quite known what to do with the monster I've created. Is it a blog? Is it a movie news site? Is it a reviewing site? Movie discussion site? I've tried to give all four aspects a go in one site and I think for the most part it has been successful but I think with TheMovieBlog shutting down... there may be a place opening for a movie blogging site to fill that void. So yes and I know I'm going to be crazy for doing this, but we might be changing the design once again. MIGHT, being the big word. Despite Obsessed With Film gaining over 35% of readers in the last six weeks, we could be going back to a blogging setup. Here's some changes I want Obsessed With Film to go through, most of these I've wanted for a long while... I want the site to have a bigger voice from the writers and myself. I want you to know who we are... what we like... and what we're about. I want you to know the people behind Obsessed With Film and whose voice it is your reading each day. As you know and this blends into bullet point number 1, I've been desperate to get a regular podcast together for quite some time now. I think this is the way forward for you to hear our personality's and a great way to discuss movies in a way that blogging never allows. The only trouble I've always had with this is that I don't know anyone personally who would be willing or would even want to do something like this, so if I'm going to do it, it would have to be over the web with Skype, which could get messy. I want things to be tidy on the site. I'm going to make things a little less messy if possible. Sort out the tagging system, the profiles pages, the reviews pages etc. I want you to be able to search through our archives and writings better. This I can do but it just takes time. I want a generic style with posts. I think the site can often look confusing and messy with the amount of images that are just flying about all over the place, so I may go AICN no-picture style for a while, and see how that works out. It should keep the site cleaner and maybe make images of a bigger impact when they are rare and not with every post. I want updates four times a day. Myself in the morning, someone at mid-day, someone on a evening and then someone to wrap up on a night. For this I am going to have to hire more writers to help me out. More on that later. That's the current manifesto. I want the site to be less cluttered. Cut off the fat. Give you the news and opinions that you care about... nothing more and nothing less. I'm going to try and cover less news that you wouldn't be interested in and just focus in on the news that matters. Let me know your thoughts. Did you prefer the old Blog design... or are you happy with this one?