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By Michael Eilers
Arizona Daily Wildcat
August 29, 1996
When I first spotted Yahoo Internet Life on the magazine rack a while back, an incredulous sneer appeared on my face - the creators of Yahoo, that famous World Wide Web search engine, think they are journalists now? A friend standing nearby warned me from buying an issue, telling me to "forget it man, it's not out of Alpha yet" - computer geek-speak for anything not quite ready for mainstream distribution.
A year has passed, and I decided to give the Internet magazine another chance.
Anyone who has spent a little time on the Web (and many of you may be doing so for the first time in the UA's many computer labs) knows that it is the epitome of flux: ever-changing, constantly updating, appearing and vanishing, and often crashing. Trying to capture that sort of dynamic environment in a monthly magazine is a pretty futile task. This became apparent right away, when I tried a few URLs (the WWW equivalent of an address) from the first few pages and was rewarded with broken links (as in, "nobody home").
However, Yahoo Internet Life has much more than just URLs. Dedicating itself to slogging through the crud to find the quality stuff, the magazine is chock-full of reviews, hints, and interviews with prominent Netizens. This particular issue (Vol. 2 No. 4) featured Siskel & Ebert and Camille Paglia, to name-drop a few.
The capsule reviews of web sites aren't much bigger than a paragraph, but they get to the point. Reviews are grouped by subject, from "Bible Study Resources" to "Cult TV Shows."
The interviews are actually rather bland (I've never seen a boring Paglia interview before, but this one was) and never seem to focus well; perhaps the journalists are too used to surfing to dive below the surface.
The magazine itself has a few bugs that should have been gone at this late date. The page layout is very quirky, with inconsistent typefaces and headers, a few, orphaned illustrations far from their articles, and the occasional typo. It is printed on newsprint-quality (nonglossy) paper that's not quite white, which makes the advertisements appear dark and blotchy. Also, in keeping with that "fresh off the Web" feel, YIL uses actual GIFs and JPEGs as illustrations in the magazine - they may look great on-screen, but they look utterly horrible in print.
There are surprisingly few advertisements, and to my relief, lots of noncommercial sites. I had been worried this rag would just be a mouthpiece for the corporate bigwigs, forgetting the little guys out there who make the net interesting. Of course, the personal pages tend to disappear or turn into pornographic animation warehouses a little faster than the corporate sites do.
YIL shows signs of a concerted effort to be nice, squeaky clean, and middle-of-the-road (you won't find a guide to adult sites, for instance) and seems to ignore some of the realities of the Web. For starters, the vast majority of Yahoo searches turn up 99 unusable, idiotic pages for every one useful link, yet according to YIL, the WWW is one endless fountain of use.
So the first magazine to travel backwards from the WWW to reality isn't without its flaws - but it has its grins, too. The piece on CNN's web site was very well done, and a good glimpse behind-the-scenes of a truly amazing site. Each issue seems full of enough URLs to keep you busy for some time. And you can even browse it in the bathroom, if you choose. Yet there is something missing in a print guide to the Web - gone is the essential randomness of surfing solo, following links on instinct, winding up where you never intended to be. It's all too sanitary, too chaperoned. Anyway, if you need a good transition between print journalism and the Web, pick up YIL, or surf to http://www.yil.com.
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