Four score and seven years ago, plus seventy-nine years and two days, minus three months, Ms. Nicole Kirk (so named at the time) brought forth a new web site, and christened it Anime Dream. A volunteer effort it was, bringing together fans of all stripes for the betterment of the anime experience, both here in the New World and abroad.

A lot has changed since then. For starters, the web grew up a little. Whereas it was once viewed as a toy, it now helps us conduct the business of our lives. Shrines turned into blogs, and with it a greater sense of responsibility to the readership and fellow site operators. It was once common for a web site to be little more than a repository of media, ripe for the picking by leeches, if not a leech itself. Anime Dream itself began in this once-quite-normal way, having a decent-sized collection of pictures and video to browse, and little else.

Today's web has a different focus, in part due to the horrific cost of serving media, and in part because the novelty of visiting collections of borrowed media has worn off, having been replaced by community-built collections of original media, like YouTube and Flickr. Blogs have also played a big role in advancing the quality of content on the web, showing not only that the field of individual journalism and opinion was ripe for the picking, but also that readers had become dissatisfied with the overall quality of the predecessors.

For our part, we at Anime Dream have responded to the trends of the web as best we could, albeit slowly. We started as a young bunch that was also young at journalism. To a certain extent we will always retain that quality, because we are a staff of volunteers. But as the elder staff members (myself included, begrudgingly) continue to rack up the years, our overall quality of writing has improved steadily. The lack of flexibility in dealing with the logistics of web publication is our challenge. It has caused us many an hour of lost productivity, most notably in the last two years.

Today, I'm writing to announce that we've taken a big step in overcoming that challenge, and now renew our commitment to you, our readership. We have migrated the majority of our old pages into a database, and installed software on the server that will help us evolve at a respectable rate. We will continue our previous duties and deliver thoughtful evaluations of yesterday's and today's anime and anime music. We will continue to document the goings-on in the anime industry. But we'll do these things a little differently, and we're preparing new offerings for the intertubes.

The first change I would like to point out is our reorganization of reviews, both for anime titles and music. If you click on "anime reviews" on our navigation bar, you will now be greeted with a listing of informational pages at the series/OVA/movie level, with our reviews for each filed neatly therein. You'll find a similar structure if you click "music reviews," with each page showing information about an album, and its reviews listed inside. We hope that this new structure improves your browsing experience on our site.

We've also introduced tagging to Anime Dream, for readers wanting a more organic browsing experience. Our navigation bar does not yet include a link for browsing our tags, so for the time being you can see the listing at this location. The listing will appear sparse for now, but should quickly beef up. We will backfill some tags on our older pages, as we get time.

Many of you have no doubt noticed the "Commentary" link on our navigation bar, whose target page has not yet contained any commentary! We did intend to start the commentary section much earlier, but the powers that be conspired against us. We will begin filling this void very soon, with in-depth articles about the industry at large, and whatever might be on our minds at any given time.

We have one or two more big changes coming, but we wanted them to be a surprise. For now, we'd just like to say, "We're back!" To those who have stuck with us since inception, we can't thank you enough. You are the reason we kept going through the tough times, and our second wind has arrived.