do some thing

Ben Brown, God love him, is stirring the pot again:

"And it goes beyond that. The creative work you do on Web sites, even if it's really good, will never get the respect it deserves. Web sites are transient. They're trivial. They're easy to discard. They leave only the faintest of impressions. But a book! A magazine! A manifesto! -- Printed at work and stapled together, passed out at the coffee shop in your neighborhood -- by virtue of the constituent atoms, it's already more important to 99% of the world's population than your Web site."

His essay inspired me to respond....

Ben, see, I'm someone who came from the world of Making Offline Things back in the day, before the web. I made books. I made newspapers. Hell, I made a newspaper every damn two weeks in college. Darn nearly kilt me.

Anyway. All that time, I longed for the web, even though I didn't know it yet. I longed for a free, fast, cheap way to spread ideas, to find readers, to create community. I hungered for it. So when it came along, I jumped right in.

I think you're right to make a call to take some of these chops back into the offline world, and I ain't gonna kill you - I agree with you! I'm all about blending the virtual and the real worlds.

Still, I've gotta warn you: I think you're attributing a golden glow to this Offline Stuff that isn't necessarily there for everyone. Spend a few years going broke paying printers with ink stained hands, and you may just run screaming back to the free, cheap, easy web.

I guess what I'm saying is, while I agree with your general call to Do Something with all the tools we've got at our disposal, I think that there's nothing inherent in a magazine that makes it more special than a website. Depends on the magazine. Depends on the website. Get it?

{ 11:53pm }