Writing for the Web

Local Online Magazines

Vancouver is graced with a couple of very good online magazines: The Tyee has been publishing since the fall of 2003, and it's become a major force in BC media. I've had a wonderful time writing for The Tyee and watching the splash it makes in our local pond. Apart from excellent political coverage, it also offers reviews, opinion, arts and personal articles, as well as an occasional serialized novel.

Dooney's Cafe is much more literary, though it also has a lot about politics. Unlike The Tyee, articles here tend to run long—a deliberate challenge to Web surfers' notoriously short attention spans, but a challenge well worth taking up.

Many more such local online magazines must be out there, but where are they? Slate and Salon can be entertaining, but they focus on US national issues; I'm curious to find online magazines (not just print magazines' websites) that focus on a particular city or region. Send me the URLs and I'll create a list of them.

Not Quite Clear on the Concept

Business Week has published an article, Blogs Will Change Your Business, that tries to evangelize readers who are too busy making money to stay technologically hip.

It's interesting, and informative in spots, and it's cute in trying to reproduce the blog format in print. But it doesn't quite work.

The article tries to bully business readers into getting into blogs as if they were the e-biz equivalent of counterterrorism: 99.9% of blogs may be innocuous, but that leaves 40 new blogs a day that may be blabbing secrets about your company, or drawing customers away from you. So to thwart those 40 evildoers, businesses are supposed to go to Status Red and start blogging their brains out.

Tim Berners-Lee Looks Ahead

I haven't yet had a chance to watch this 58-minute video from MIT, but it should be well worth it: Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the father of us all, looking into the future of The Semantic Web.

Intellectual Property—with Very Sharp Teeth

The Internet is reportedly agog over a lecture given this week by Jasper Rine, a UC Berkeley biology professor. More precisely, the fuss is over a brief digression from his lecture in which he addressed the problems faced by a student who swiped Rine's laptop in search of the final exam. The thief swiped a lot more, and the prof concisely described the awful implications. A transcript is available at Blastradius, apparently now one of the most-visited sites in the blogosphere.