************************************************************** * * * CYBERSPACE * * A biweekly column on net culture appearing * * in the Toronto Sunday Sun * * * * Copyright 1999 Karl Mamer * * Free for online distribution * * All Rights Reserved * * Direct comments and questions to: * * * * * ************************************************************** There used to be a great joke about the net: The Internet is Tetris for people who can still read. (If you don't know what Tetris is, substitute "salty peanuts" and read it again.) No one is repeating that joke today. It's hard to be smug when the web has filled the net with too many pretty pictures. Netizens also used to be smug about how great their web sites were. While Kraft-eating university students created things like Yahoo, big, evil corporation tossed up loads of glossy content-free pages. Where the Kraft-eaters really shined was in the creation of electronic zines ("ezines" for short). Tradition paper zines are made on a budget of whatever the editor has after rent 'n' smokes. Paper costs shot up around the time the artistic crowd discovered HTML wasn't a programming language and zines quickly found a home on the web (see www.meer.net/~johnl/e-zine-list/ for a huge index). Ezines are not limited to the web. A handful predate it. Since 1985 Phrack (freeside.com/phrack.html) has been providing hackers with all sorts of obscure information. Most ezines don't have one tenth of Phrack's longevity, however. Too many great ezines suffer premature deaths. For example, Sober Witness (www.sober.com) is an ezine that lives up to its hype as a "Hype-Free Guide to the Web." Unfortunately it seems to be in, well, extended hiatus. Why do good ezines peter out? Economic Darwinism tells us good people eventually get jobs. Since about '91 few working stiffs have had time to turn out truck loads of writing. Alternatively, many web sites become victims of their own success. The fun stops when hits exceed your limit and you get billed per meg. An ezine doesn't have to die because of money. Companies like to advertise to large, homogenous concentrations of people. Right? The net offers that. Right? So why don't some popular sites have advertisers bidding for ad space? Advertisers, I gather, prefer people actually see their ads. Users have little motivation to spend valuable online time viewing commercial messages and can easily ignore them by setting their browsers to "images off." A better approach to financing an ezine is sponsorship. Sage individuals like Canadian Internet Handbook co-author Jim Carroll have been saying for years that the net is not a billboard but a way of building good will. Microsoft is leading the way with its sponsorship of Slate (www.slate.com). I might curse a Windows GPF but when I visit Slate and read Harry Shearer I get a warm fuzzy feeling for Microsoft in the back of my mind -- and isn't the back of your mind the part all advertisers really want to reach?