On December 31, Steve Ogden, founder and writer of the online independent animation zine AnimWatch, called it a day. Disappointed in AnimWatch’s low readership after its four-year run, he announced his decision to stop producing the website in order to devote more time to his own films.

AnimWatch’s focus on independent animation was unique. Its thoughtful edited content, including film profiles and interviews with independent animation producers, clearly took a lot of time and effort. In his announcement of the site’s demise, Steve consoles himself with this thought:

If there were an easier way to run a site like AnimWatch, someone else would be doing it.

Well, maybe. It’s easy to think that since the world is so chock-full of nonsense, all the good thoughts must have already been thunk, but I have more faith in the infinite number of monkeys.

All Together Now

True: the signal-to-noise ratio of the Internet is very, very low; you must wade through an enormous cloud of chaos to find the useful bits. And like any onerous task, finding useful things online is easier if you have help.

The same goes for putting useful things online. It’s easy enough to get user input; as the owner of any public restroom will tell you, people like to express themselves anonymously in public. How do you make it useful? I believe a lot of the problem is simple formatting, e.g. this except of a page from CGTalk, which is about 10% content by volume:

The little white lines adrift in the sea of tasteful, high-tech charcoal? Those are words. On the left is a towering inferno of ego, including each poster’s quote of the day, links to their portfolio, chat, and an icon that shows if they’re hot or not. To solve this problem, I recommend requiring posters to fight each other in single combat, with real swords, forever.

The online forum as we know it, like most of the Internet, is bloated, inefficient, and warped by hidden interests and agendas. By contrast, AnimWatch offered straightforward, focused content in a field that is growing daily. Someday its problems will be solved, and something will step forward to take its place.

Til then: thanks, Steve, and good luck with your work.

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