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Post by bixaorellana on Feb 1, 2010 16:12:10 GMT
A Webzine is an ezine hosted on the World Wide Web rather than in print. <--- click to read moreSo far I have been resistant to the idea of magazines on line. The whole magazine experience seems tied to print -- the crisp feel of a brand-new magazine, the ability to drag it from the sofa to the bathroom, the slippery teetering piles next to your favorite chair, even the annoying, stiff subscription cards, ever so handy as place markers. All magazines promise delights within, but it's only the ones that repeatedly engage us with a mixture of in-depth articles, well-presented graphics, and general feel that make the personal cut. I just found an online magazine that I think would make me come back for more. I admire how the front page colors and graphics announce an au courant sensibility, yet somehow also suggest seriousness and commitment to a standard of quality. So, here's a thread to serve as Any Port's magazine rack. Please add your recommendations and reviews. To begin: a regular corner newstand of mags online: www.magatopia.com/and the webzine that prompted this thread: popshifter.com/
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 21, 2010 16:10:52 GMT
The tone of this article suggests that in the not-distant future all our magazines will be online, with no print options available. Whatever else, this is a remarkable bootstraps story of the creation of the online design magazine Lonny: For the first issue [of Lonny], Ms. Adams and Mr. Cline roped designers and magazine editors they had met in the industry into letting them photograph their homes. They spent $1,000 of their own money and borrowed Ms. Adams’s parents’ car to drive to shoots. They bartered for free photo-processing and equipment in exchange for ads.
Exhausted and assuming that Lonny would never amount to more than a hobby alongside their day jobs, they went to Paris to vacation and photograph. They woke up from a jetlagged nap to find their in-boxes full of messages from advertisers who wanted to buy ads in the second issue.
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Lonny looks and acts like a print magazine, not a Web site or a blog. It has pages to turn, a table of contents and full-page ads. But it offers Web-only benefits like zoomable, clickable images, so readers can inspect a lamp displayed in a photograph of someone’s living room and then click to buy it.
Many readers still like to lounge on the couch and flip through glossy pages with big stylish photos, but as mainstays like Domino and Gourmet disappear, readers are forced to look elsewhere. The Web sites of magazines like Lucky, Bon Appétit and Architectural Digest, however, are either underdeveloped or visually different from their print counterparts.Well, see for yourself ~~ click on the picture above. And it's appropriate that an online publication have its own facebook page. Go here for an AnyPort discussion of online food magazines.
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Post by bjd on Jun 21, 2010 18:11:33 GMT
Have I missed something? It just looks like a bunch of advertising. Would you actually buy something like this, Bixa?
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 21, 2010 18:27:19 GMT
Bjd, I'm still wedded to the idea of print magazine. However, it's looking more and more as though online magazines are a wave of the future.
Did you allow the site to load completely? It is exactly like a print magazine, except of course we're viewing it on a monitor. The table of contents thing is a little fiddly, but try looking at one of the articles and you'll see what I mean. Find an article in the index, then go to the little pale thumbnails at the bottom of the page & mouse-over until you find the page number. For instance, I viewed the story "Island Retreat". It is identical to the same sort of article in any print home decorating magazine except that it has more pages and pictures, undoubtedly because of the much lower cost of production.
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Post by bjd on Jun 21, 2010 18:31:23 GMT
Well, I vaguely tried to zoom in on an article, but that is really not the kind of stuff I would ever buy or read. Well, maybe in a dentist's office if the other choice is a 4 year-old car magazine.
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Post by joanne28 on Jun 23, 2010 3:02:46 GMT
What I like about magazines of this genre (print or online) are the ideas I get. They can be very stimulating.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 23, 2010 6:56:36 GMT
Since I read most magazines on the toilet or in bed, I can't really move to any webzines at the present time. In any case, I would indeed be leery of the fact that they are all much more advertising oriented than even print publications.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 23, 2010 7:56:16 GMT
Maybe you need to take advantage of this price war. I keep old New Yorkers in the john. It's where I do my intelligent reading. Right now I'm working on a long article about the economic history of Iran. What are the chances I'd read this if it weren't in the bathroom? IOne thing about old magazines -- it doesn't matter if they get all wavy from the humidity, something that's probably not so good for a kindle.
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