Oliver Willis writes:
> The second class will be more exciting. Individuals and small teams
> creating truly unique things - whether that be programming, design,
> content, writing - whatever. Some of it will be commercial, and some
> will be art for art's sake. I think the majority of it will be
> successfull - just due to the comfort factor with the medium.

Been meaning to throw some stuff back on this for a while.

While I welcome the side projects, I don't think the majority of it
will be "successful", unless by successful you mean that the authors
will be able to reach as large an audience as their content will carry
to.

For many years, whenever I got into a new city I tried to hunt down
its 'zine scene. And I ran into some great stuff, some of which later
became semi-famous: a journal called Intertek edited by Steve
Steinberg that was all the good bits of Wired without the consumer
fetishism; Beer Frame, the journal of inconspicuous consumption; Gray
Areas magazine; the wonderful Satire magazine; and numerous others,
some just folded and stapled 8x11" photocopies, some with 4 color
printing, albeit with distributions in the thousands, obviously
someone's dream.

And I've got a shelf full of small run books, well written (if
sometimes preachy) novels, poetry, the like.

And although the 'net gave some of these life, it also killed a number
of them. Unless there's buzz in your regular community, a month
between publications doesn't keep readers checking back, while
subscriptions or placement in a frequented bookstore does. The lack of
sending out something tangible causes a disconnect with readers, if
they're not used to writing, the publisher no longer has the awareness
of readers.

Of course for every one of those that was good I waded through a
boatload of crap, or at least uninteresting to me.

I don't think the web is going to change that. 90% of everything will
still be crap. What it will allow is that I'll no longer have to go to
new physical cities to find new materials, but as with that "buzz in
your regular community" issue, I will have to go to new virtual spaces
to find them.

One of the things I've found is that the 'net tends to cluster into
these little closed loops. Flutterby links to Mouthorgan which links
to Scarlet Letters which links to Pursed Lips which links back to
Flutterby. Occasionally I'll run across a different closed loop, but
we still have fairly small communities, just now they're organized by
something other than geography (and I'm not sure just what that
something is).

Making publishing easier won't make anything better, just look at what
the Macintosh did for graphic design, but just as desktop publishing
also made a bunch of small newsletters and 'zines more compelling and
fun to publish, I expect that the web will allow us to form
communities and reader bases organized around interest rather than
geography and availability.

Dan