Well, it’s a new year, and
therefore a time of change. The grand experiment that is the “Penny Thought”
began two years ago. I had just come off a difficult year for me when I wasn’t
able to get to the cinema nearly as much as I would’ve liked. My weekly reviews
were sporadic at best, and several times throughout the year, I had gone two
weeks or more without a post. The visitations to my site were suffering. I had
to do something to increase my readership.
Up until the invention of my
“Penny Thoughts”, I often fielded inquiries about movies I’d seen but for which
I hadn’t written a review. This included current video releases and older
films. I had been writing my impressions of movies for a Facebook app that has
since gone the way of the Dodo, and I thought, why couldn’t I publish those as
a sort of mini review for the movies I saw that didn’t get a full-length. So I
decided to publish a weekly feature that would include mini-reviews of all the
movies I watched at home during the week. “Penny Thoughts” was born. I
published my first Penny Thoughts in January 2010.
The truth is the evolution
of the Penny Thought goes back much further than that. One of my earliest and
favorite reviews I’ve ever written for this site was for the movie “Be Cool”.
It remains to this day the shortest review I’ve ever written. I didn’t think
I’d ever write a review like that one again. When I’m writing a full-length
review, I feel the need to give whatever film I’m critiquing full respect in
considering as many of its aspects as I can in a reasonable amount of space. A
review like the one I wrote for “Be Cool”, while appropriate to the quality of
the movie, doesn’t do that. Penny Thoughts is a venue in which I can give just
my impression of a movie rather than lavishing a fully functional review on it.
Penny Thoughts has been
immensely successful in fixing the problems I was having with my critiquing
output a couple of years ago, and it has been even more successful in
increasing the amount of traffic to my site. By October of its first year,
Penny Thoughts doubled the amount of discrete visits to A Penny in the Well, to
a total of 25,000 since I began tracking visits in 2008. By the end of February
2011 that number had doubled once again. At its current rate, the number should
double again and we could reach 100,000 discrete visits by April 2012. Compared
to other movie sites on the web, those numbers aren’t immensely impressive, but
it’s encouraging that my readership is growing at a steady rate. However, I
want more.
During 2012, A Penny in the
Well will become a daily site, with new posts every day. Those posts will be
coming from Penny Thoughts. The expanded feature will no longer be a weekly. I
will feature a new film review each day within the new Penny Thoughts format.
Each film will get its own individual post. This will make it easier to search
the site for movies that you, the reader, want to know about. The best way to
search the site remains the Blogger search field located at the top left corner
of the page. I hope to redesign the entire site to be more user friendly in the
coming months. Hopefully we can make it even easier to find my opinion on the
movies you want to know about.
For those on my e-mail list,
don’t worry. You won’t be receiving an e-mail on my latest review every day.
The e-mails on A Penny in the Well postings will now be sent out once a week
and will include a link to each new posting during that week. Of course, if you
no longer wish to receive e-mail notices, just reply with a message asking me
to remove your e-mail address. Anyone wishing to be added to my e-mail list, go
to my profile and contact me through the “E Mail” link. And hey, follow me.
The reviews I’m writing for
Penny Thoughts today are much more insightful and detailed than when they first
began. Some reviews are even nearing my featured full-lengths in word count.
But, Penny Thoughts will still allow me the venue to write mere impressions on
movies that I don’t feel need any more or that I’ve screened several times
throughout the years. Needless to say, Penny Thoughts are here to stay and like
the whole of A Penny in the Well will evolve to continue to give my readers the
best insight on the web into the movies we watch.
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