What's a zine?

RELease 1.0, June 23, 1995 by Jerry Michalski

Zoe and Phil have found the Internet. Zoe has launched a zine on the Net called Zoe's Zoo Zine. Born from Zoe's love of animals, ZZZ is a hybrid publication and conversation space built atop the World Wide Web. It also makes use of many other online tools and hides occasional surprises.

ZZZ is free and quite conversational. Its members adopt animal characters and overindulge in animal metaphors and puns. Of course, it has animalrelated discussion groups, pet adoption and pet-sitting classifieds, and Web links to good veterinarians, PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) and the Humane Society. Participants chat every day at feeding time. There's also ZooMOO, an ongoing multi-player text environment in which participants act out food-chain fantasies on the African veldt. (It's not for the faint-hearted.) If they wish to, visitors to ZZZ can hear RealAudio recordings (looped) that include rainforest and barnyard sounds. Disney is trying to convince Zoe to add the Jungle Book soundtrack (in exchange for their logo and link prominently displayed), but so far to no avail. This place has atmosphere, even if your mind tells you it's a bit smelly.

But wait. The zoo motif is really a facade. Zoe's Zoo Zine isn't limited to animal stuff: It's a front-end to the world of new media masquerading as a zoo. It's intended for people with a sense of humor who want to find stuff in general and connect with others on the Internet. People who frequent the zine and participate appreciate this.

Instead of lists of categories at compendium Web sites such as Yahoo and the Virtual Library, ZZZ has more intuitive, often highly visual ways to find your way to what you want, with different points of entry for novices and old hands. The key is Zoe, who discovered that she has a talent for presenting complicated things clearly. Zoe points liberally to the zines of people who have similar expressive gifts. She's also a good discussion moderator, a rare skill. Because of these talents and her generally contagious good spirits, ZZZ now has a hefty base of participants. It helps that there's no fee. In the sea of flashy stuff now prevalent on the Web, Zoe's Zoo Zine is a fun and useful haven.

A different zine

Phil sniffs profit in the air. His desktop-software venture flopped; it just about burned through the money he made when he sold his ecotourism business. Now he has started a zine of his own, Phil's Philodendron Phantasies (3P), which focuses on gardening. He wants it to be the Bob and Ray Show of gardening (well, maybe just the Bob Show). He's taking a pretty aggressive approach. He uses e-mail "push" promotions: Subscribers receive periodic messages advertising specials. The messages have embedded buttons that take recipients straight to 3P.

Phil's Philodendron Phantasies is a great place to get tips and make contact with other gardeners. Phil connects to botanists, gardeners and hobbyists with spare time around the world. He gets them to answer questions around the clock. No plant species is so exotic that you can't find an expert online at 3P. The zine makes heavy use of multiple ways to communicate. Occasionally Phil invites one or more of the experts to real-time conversations using CU-SeeMe and Internet Relay Chat or WebChat (see glossary, page 23). Sometimes he uses a multiparty version of the Internet Phone, which offers live audio, or public-access cable, with live callers and e-mailers. The choice depends on what format and forum the key participants are most comfortable with. Phil has access to all the different media.

Membership in 3P cost $3 a month, payable yearly in your favorite form of electronic cash. Phil will take other kinds of payment, but with a 10 percent surcharge. 3P has links to many garden-supply vendors, including Smith & Hawken and Burpee. Phil gets a three percent commission for purchases made through his zine. Phil has linked 3P to the best gardening discussions he can find anywhere, including some on the Usenet (which Phil philters for quality) and on Prodigy. His subscribers can get to those Prodigy discussions for a limited period by using a new "guest pass" protocol, even if they don't subscribe to Prodigy themselves (see page 21). Along with the other resources the zine offers, this ability to cut across service boundaries and map directly to the best conversations around has made Phil's Philodendron Phantasies a very popular place.

Platforms for business and pleasure

Alas, Zoe and Phil's zines are fantasies. We're not aware of any online spaces that combine all these functions, although there are many great nearzine experiments going on, such as Wired Magazine's HotWired and the WaxWeb, which links a MOO to the Web. There's no guest-pass protocol that pierces proprietary service boundaries -- not yet, anyway.

The Zoe and Phil zines are meant to offer a taste of zines' potential, which is the subject of the rest of this issue of Release 1.0.

The term "zine" usually describes quirky, highly personal, small-circulation paper publications written partly as a hobby, partly by compulsion. They are one person's continuing compendium of humor, insight, literature or wicked prose. The typical zine is mimeographed or photocopied and mailed or handed to a short list of subscribers. Zine prices are quite low; they often barely cover printing and mailing. Pushing the tools of assembly is sometimes part of the challenge and charm. Photocopiers become special-effects machines. The thing that most characterizes zines is the author's presence in the work. Some aspects of this description are ideal for the concept we'd like to convey. Others aren't, so the first section of this issue redefines the term "zine" and fleshes out what this new kind of zine might be.(1) The second section focuses on zines as platforms for business. The third looks at the changes happening to the communications and publishing infrastructure and presents a model for understanding that change. The final section is a wish list: It describes a variety of business opportunities that emerge from the foregoing ideas and trends.