As long-time (well, six months or so) readers of alt.internet.
media-coverage know, I often try to review 'net magazines. However, since
changing jobs in May, I've had very little time to do so. I was even sent
three copies of a very flashy, very colorful, generally signal-free
magazine called The Net, but ran out of time to review 'em.
But today I have time and a few comments to make, so here I am
reviewing what I'd still consider to be the best of the 'net-related
magazines: Internet World.
First off, I've got to thank our own Tristan Louis for mentioning
a.i.m-c as the Best Newsgroup of 1995. To be sure, he probably should've
mentioned that he co-wrote the FAQ, but that was before he started
working for MceklerMedia so it might be okay.
Truth is, this group really has come into its own this year. But,
it was created on June 15 '94, and the entire Internet came into its own
this year, so that's not too surprising.
In many of the Best & Worst bits this year, spamming (traditional
Usenet spamming, unsolicited e-mail, etcetera) was mentioned as one of
the Worst of 1995. Joel Snyder went so far as to state that "...there
are no signs of improvement."
It certainly seemed that way a month ago (which is probably when
that was written), what with that unmitigated asshole Jeff Slaton spamming
at full blast and "Krazy Kevin" Lipschitz's magazine subscription ads on
every mailing list. But pop into news.admin.net-abuse.misc today, and the
largest hubbub seems to be about how soon net.kook John "Manus" Grubor
will be sued for libel.
Stephen van der Berg (creator of Procmail and SmartList) and
others have devised stronger anti-spam measures for mailing lists. Chris
Lewis, Benjamin Franz, and an endless list of other newsadmins continue to
devise new and better ways to clean up Usenet spams. More and more ISP's
are adding anti-net-abuse clauses to their user contracts. And more FAQs
are being written all the time.
In may be an uphill battle, but we're winning.
Along with reviewing magazines (which I don't have time for), I've
often considered reviewing advertisements (which I don't have the patience
for.) It seems that in Internet World, most of the worst ads are in the
first 50 or so pages, such as Supra's "Out of the box and on to the net in
minutes" (which has an MSN screen in the picture), or the always-hideous
Wollongong "Edgar" ads, or the endless plethora of cyber-whatever
products. Nothing is cooler just because its cyber.
Reid Goldsborough's and Kevin Savett's articles about FAQs were
nice to see (always nice to see an article that helps people RTFMTODS),
but were each off on one or two things. Thomas Fine's FAQ archive at Ohio
State hasn't been updated in months, ever since he left Ohio State to work
on his SmartPages project (http://www.smartpages.com). Unfortunately,
I've heard reports that SmartPages is currently just as outdated. Also,
why wasn't the faq-maintainers mailing list mentioned?
As always, I'm glad to be a subscriber, and I'm still waiting for
one or more of the flashy cybermondocool "100 URL's in this issue!" newbie
'net magazines to grow up, buy some clues, and start offering Internet
World some real competition.
