A Magazine For My Life on the Net (Not from the Top Shelf) (Web User)

Member Name: marandina

Product:	Web User
Date:	22/04/06 (210 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Well written, endlessly interesting

Disadvantages: Some may find it light weight

If I’m honest, I don’t usually do magazines. I always think that those endless rows of glossies that you see adorning the shelves of WH Smith are just a license to print money. There’s usually everything from magazines for puppet enthusiasts to the riveting “Crochet Monthly” and sometimes the “Bank of England” weekly, which may *well* be a license to print money – who knows? However, I’ve recently bucked the trend apart from having to forcibly buy “Mizz” for my teenage daughter (she bullies me, y'know) and the Spongebob magazine/comic for my 10-year-old son. I’ve been buying “Web User” for a few weeks now and just love it. Want to know why? Oh, don’t be like that – I’ll tell you anyway. “Web User” is the UK’s best-selling magazine about the Internet, a subject that holds an endless fascination for me these days.

The magazine is issued fortnightly and retails at £1.95, which is competitive, compared to comparable computer magazines. I recently bought something about PS2 games costing £5.99. It had a demo disc with games on it but not a huge amount else in it compared to “Web User”. This production has got the Plain English seal and is written in concise, easy to follow language; I would have said this was crucial for any magazine and especially for one dealing with relatively technical issues like this does. Andrew Craig is the present editor who gets a small slot at the beginning of each issue. During 2005 the average circulation was 31,886 copies per issue and the mag has its own web site at www.webuser.co.uk. The issue dated 16 – 29 March 2006 was the magazine’s 5th birthday issue confirming its established status amongst readers since inception back in 2001.

Organisation is good with things split into four broad categories – Features/Regulars/Practical Web User/Downloaded. The features cover topical issues that will be of interest to the readership. In the most recent issue, the features included 100 Internet tips and tricks, alternatives to eBay, an article about how to get your writing published online, a feature about web sites devoted to art and a piece about free tools for downloading large files using BitTorrent. I particularly liked the article about getting your written work published as it showed, once again, the liberating impact of the Internet in that you can now bypass the major publishers and get your work published by using one of the online agencies. After all, even the first Harry Potter book was rejected 12 times! Other recent features from previous magazines have included things like IQ tests on the Net, software to win online auctions and where to find the best TV on the Web.

Regular features include the latest news/letters/Consumer Champion & Shopping Challenge/best new web sites/Web User essentials amongst others. You’ll also find a regular competition slot to win things like digital cameras and ipods. The news section is usually very interesting and tends to be amongst the longer articles in each issue. Typically, it’s 9 pages or so and like most of the features is broken down into block paragraphs supported by plenty of colour images. These shorts paragraphs make reading very episodic but easy and the kind of things you find are subjects like the fact that more women than men will be using the Internet by 2007 (in terms of time online and according to the European Interactive Advertising Association), BT criticising uSwitch over the commission it earns and the fact that Brits sent 99 million texts a day in February 2006. As you’d expect, there is loads of cross-referencing to various sites across the WWW to generate that interactive feel that goes hand-in-hand with using the Internet in general. There are pages devoted to the newest web sites to launch and these always make for fascinating reading. The innovation of the Internet never fails to astound and recent, new sites include one devoted to calculating the amount of sugar in McDonald’s hamburgers (www.mcdonaldsmenu.info) whilst www.haggle4me.com is a site where visitors post details of a product they wish to buy and challenge people to find it cheaper. If it is found cheaper then the finder gets 20% of the amount saved by the buyer. Man, those site designers are clever cats!

Practical Web User includes articles on things like solving problems, general hints and tips and practical features. Turning photos into an online slide show and managing e-mail using ePrompter are just 2 recent examples of the kind of thing you’ll find in this section and, again, there are plenty of images to support the concisely written pieces that make it easy to understand. A recent feature talked about safeguarding your PC against the ever present threat of spyware that was interesting alongside a piece about creating web pages using Google for folks clamouring to design their own web pages.

Downloaded supports the increasingly popular concept of streaming media over the Net. Here you’ll find articles about where to find the latest Podcasts for film and TV, as well as free software, a section on sports and games and music downloads. With the advent of downloading movies by Broadband, you can find the latest teasers and trailers for movies like King Kong whilst Snow Patrol’s latest album is headlined by a live session available at www.bbc.co.uk/6music/shows/gideon_coe in the latest issue. I particularly like the section on free software. I’ve recently downloaded a small file at www.disccleaner.nl, which cleans up my hard drive like nothing available on my PC itself clearing up a sizeable area of disk.

As far as criticism goes, then some will find “Web User” lightweight. Articles tend to be on the short side and written in layman’s terms and for the more technically advanced then this may not be enough to hold one’s attention. As ever with magazines, there are plenty of adverts throughout but at least they don’t pop up or under stuff your are browsing and you can simply flick past them! I guess you could find most of the stuff featured by simply surfing the Net yourself, negating the need to buy the magazine at all or you could even glean a lot of the information featured from the magazine’s web site. Personally, for the price and convenience of being able to actually touch and feel something that I can read anywhere then I think the cover price is justified but then most folks love the concept of doing things for free on the Net so it is down to the end-user at the end of the day (cheapskates!). The one thing I wasn’t sure about recently was a series that has started about DIY upgrading your own memory/hard drive. Poking about inside your PC with just a magazine to guide you looks fraught with danger to me although there were disclaimers with the article. I just hope that Web User’s lawyers are on standby for the first reader to sue having lost all of the contents of his/her hard drive having tried to replace their memory card/hard drive with a totally incompatible new one!

It is possible to subscribe to “Web User” either via the magazine or online. You can get a deal whereby you would get the next 6 issues for just £1 and then a 10% reduction on the cover price by agreeing to pay by direct debit. Of course, you’d also have the advantage of having them sent to your home address by post saving you the chore of visiting your newsagent or, in my case, the omnipresent Tesco.

All in all, I’m hooked on this magazine. It opens up the world of the Internet and acts as a signpost for finding new and exciting areas for me to investigate. In its particular niche, "Web User" stacks up well against the competition and is written in a way that will appeal to a large cross-section of readers from the very young (say 5+) to the very old. At less than a couple of quid each fortnight, it’s no expense at all and I heartily recommend it to fellow web addicts like myself!

Thanks for reading

Mara

Links: www.webuser.co.uk/forum

e-mail news@webuser.co.uk

Summary: Overview of Webuser