What's a zine?

RELease 1.0, June 23, 1995 by Jerry Michalski

The online services that pursue this strategy will create platforms that are great places for people to run small businesses. The host platforms can then offer (or link to) additional services such as bookkeeping, accounting, tax advice, transaction services and so forth, keeping a portion of all the fees. In this way, there will be zine hosts, sponsored zines and independent zines.

Pushing the technology

HotWired is a great example of the use of zine technology, though it's more of a zine host than a zine itself. It has attitude, but not a person's voice. Some disembodied entity directs the activity, not Chip Bayers, HotWired's managing editor, Barbara Kuhr, its principal designer, or any other staff member.

At the bottom of many articles in HotWired is a link that allows readers to post their thoughts to Web-readable pages. These threaded conversations are quite popular and will continue to grow in expressive power. For example, people posting notes this way can embed HTML code and images in their messages. They have to know the technology, but the resulting messages are more visually interesting than plain-text ones. Bayers would like to offer easier, richer multimedia experiences. To that end, he and his staff are experimenting with HotJava, RealAudio and other technologies.

Dig he must!

One of the zines that HotWired hosts is Dave Winer's DaveNet (see Release 1.0, 12-94). Winer, a restless and creative soul, is rolling his own zine. His tools are products he designed himself. In 1981 Winer founded Living Videotext, which created the popular outlining and presentation package MORE (previously ThinkTank; we were addicts ourselves). He sold the company to Symantec in 1987, then founded UserLand, which created Frontier, a Macintosh application-scripting environment (see Release 1.0, 5-91). A couple of months ago, Winer decided to give Frontier away for free, hoping it would become a standard so that UserLand could make money in the aftermarket. Outlines and scripts are recurring themes in Winer's life.

Winer started DaveNet less than a year ago, when out of frustration he decided to start sending an occasional e-mail message to a long list of influential people he had met over the years. He took his rolodex, scripting language and Qualcomm's Eudora (which is highly scriptable) and wrote a mailing list server.(3)

Through DaveNet, Winer unabashedly writes what's on his mind and heart once or twice a week. His comments range from worship of Aretha Franklin (what's the word? r-e-s-p-e-c-t) to the state of the software industry, gender issues, local weather conditions and the mood he's in. Winer often wears his heart on his sleeve; he's also not afraid to be politically incorrect, which makes his pieces lively and provokes responses which he selectively republishes in subsequent letters to the list.

Recently Winer created a Web site on HotWired, where people can read all the old DaveNet postings, as well as other things Dave finds interesting and useful. In his quest to create a great interactive Web site, Winer is developing new applications using Frontier and C, which include Clay Basket, an outline-based Web bookmark utility, and AutoWeb, an automated Web-generation tool. (To see a great personal site, check out Winer's friend Barton, whom he points to on his Web site; see Resources, page 23.)