A Magazine for - Who? (It's on the Net)

Member Name: jaybee

Product:	It's on the Net
Date:	27/02/01 (61 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: 10000 websites listed every month

Disadvantages: 10000 websites listed every month

"It’s on the Net" magazine bills itself as being ‘The Uk’s biggest monthly website review.’ And I for one wouldn’t argue with that statement.

It’s a relatively new magazine, I believe. I saw it for the first time in my newsagents a week or so ago and decided to buy a copy after having a quick flick through. I would have had a longer look had I been in a larger newsagents, but my local shop owner is a whinging old devil and cries of ‘Are you buying that?’ or ‘If you want to read magazines go to the library!’ were bound to be uttered as I had been reading the mag for all of three nanoseconds.

Anyway at first glance it looked okay, inside the magazine were apparently 10,000 websites. Well not the actual websites of course - or there would have needed to be some type of internet connection and monitor inside the magazine which would have meant the price would have been considerably more than just under three quid! - But the URL’s for 10,000 websites covering a wide range of topics.

There were also a couple of feature articles on general stuff –One on search engines and how they performed in bringing back relevant results, there was another about Amazon.com and one about Buffy The Vampire Slayer. The first five or six pages also had sidebars with newsy items and information and some websites to check out. There are also short items on other pages that cover a topic or website that is featured on that page. These don’t go into great detail, but maybe give you things like facts and figures on the subject, or when the website was launched.

The actual magazine is set out like a directory – a bit like yellow pages for the Internet I suppose – and contained 146 pages. There are colour coded categories (26 IN ALL) covering various subjects like Education and Careers, Clothes& Beauty, Sport, Travel, Music, to name a few. There is also a separ
ate section for WAP and mobile Internet sites that I’m sure a lot of people would be interested in.

The sections were then all split into smaller more specific groups. The Sports section for instance, covered everything from archery to volleyball. There were various website addresses for each subject, and some like athletics had quite a few URL’s while other like Lacrosse (honest it was there) only had one or two. The actual URL’s are in bold type and every website listed has a short 5-10 word review telling you about the site and its content. There are no ratings as such to tell you if the site is good great or indifferent, but the magazine does say that it only brings the best sites to its readers every month.

My favourite section was the weird and wacky websites. These included a site for the Clangers (remember them?) and one of my particular favourites The tasty insect Recipe website (Can’t wait to cook for the in-laws).

But was the magazine useful?

Well I didn’t really think so. I mean – it would be okay if you were looking for something specific, like travel sites, or maybe a minority pastime or sport, but other than that I’m not quite sure who would use it or why. Maybe people new to the Internet would use it to get around in the early stages, but I can’t see people buying it on a monthly basis, I mean-there wasn’t even an entry for Dooyoo in any of the sections. (Shock and Horror). To be fair, the reference section was pretty good and covered a lot of areas like government information departments and things but I’m sure many people would already know of quite a lot of the websites listed.

I suppose it could be argued that a magazine like this would save you having to go into a search engine and then wade through the results - some of which would be no use to you at all – to get the information you want.

You could also say that looking t
hrough a pile of magazines to find what you are looking for is also time consuming, and would take up a bit of room. I would definitely prefer to look at search engine results than go through a pile of magazines.

So I guess it really is about personal preferences. If you buy the magazine you are sure to find one or two really good sites that will interest you

But would you be willing to pay £3 just to get the URL of a couple of decent sites?

Summary: