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FringeWare Review was a magazine about subculture (predominantly cyberculture) published in Austin, Texas. Many of the publication's writers and editors were associated with other publications such as Boing Boing , Mondo 2000 , Whole Earth Review , and Wired . The last issue of the magazine was #14, published in 1998. The magazine had an international circulation, distributed primarily by Fine Print, an Austin-based company that focused on 'zine distribution.
FringeWare Review was established in 1994. [1] The publication was co-founded by Jon Lebkowsky and Paco Nathan, with art director Monte McCarter and assistant editor Tiffany Lee Brown. The magazine's parent company, FringeWare, Inc., was the first company built on Internet community (the FringeWare email list, later referred to as the FringeWare News Network), and probably the first to use web technology when it appeared. FringeWare also had presences on The WELL and on Illuminati Online's Metaverse, which was conceived as a commercial multiuser object-oriented environment (MOO). Fringe Ware quickly built an international reputation through the Internet and the magazine. As online communities and the Internet spread in popularity during the 1990s, Fringe Ware became known as an early forebear to online commerce sites such as Amazon and to magazines such as Wired , which named Fringe Ware Review in its Top 10 List. [2]
The company also owned an independent bookstore in Austin, Texas, that was an underground culture-hub for the city of Austin. Many performances and events were held at the bookstore, for example the first US performance of Austrian art pranksters monochrom in 1998. FringeWare was one of many independent businesses to disappear from Austin during the late 1990s.
Lebkowsky and Nathan, who met as Austin-based associate editors of the print version of bOING bOING , originally conceived the company as a way to bring micro producers of cool software and gadgets to market via ecommerce. They began with an email list, which had high adoption among an international set of technoculture mavens and Internet early adopters, and later became known as the FringeWare News Network. Nathan built a web site in 1992, creating an early custom content management system and online catalog of products. This would have become the first instance of ecommerce on the Internet, however credit card companies pre-SSL prohibited online sales, so the alternative was mail-order, and this required a print catalog. While hashing out plans for a FringeWare catalog, the two decided to create a magazine, inspired by Boing Boing and Whole Earth Review/Coevolution Quarterly, with a catalog in the back pages. Mark Frauenfelder of Boing Boing referred to the publication as a "magalog."
FringeWare has been, if not the home, then the battered half-way house for half of the memage in your head. Schwa, SubGenius, the FringeWare review, BoingBoing, them Bots which win the Turing Contest, the Dead Media Project. I'm sure they'd consider it an honour if you were in the area and find out - as was always FringeWare's creed - WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON. [3]
Wired is a monthly American magazine, published in print and online editions, that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. Owned by Condé Nast, it is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and has been in publication since March/April 1993. Several spin-offs have been launched, including Wired UK, Wired Italia, Wired Japan, and Wired Germany.
Barnes & Noble Booksellers is an American bookseller. It is a Fortune 1000 company and the bookseller with the largest number of retail outlets in the United States. As of July 7, 2020, the company operates 614 retail stores across all 50 U.S. states.
Prodigy Communications Corporation was an online service from 1984 to 2001 that offered its subscribers access to a broad range of networked services, including news, weather, shopping, bulletin boards, games, polls, expert columns, banking, stocks, travel, and a variety of other features.
Omni was a science and science fiction magazine published for domestic American and UK markets. It contained articles on science, parapsychology, and short works of science fiction and fantasy. It was published as a print version between October 1978 and 1995. The first Omni e-magazine was published on CompuServe in 1986 and the magazine switched to a purely online presence in 1996. It ceased publication abruptly in late 1997, following the death of co-founder Kathy Keeton; activity on the magazine's website ended the following April.
The CueCat, styled :CueCat with a leading colon, is a cat-shaped handheld barcode reader that was given away free to Internet users starting in 2000 by the now-defunct Digital Convergence Corporation.
Boing Boing is a website, first established as a zine in 1988, later becoming a group blog. Common topics and themes include technology, futurism, science fiction, gadgets, intellectual property, Disney, and left-wing politics. It twice won the Bloggies for Weblog of the Year, in 2004 and 2005. The editors are Mark Frauenfelder, David Pescovitz, Carla Sinclair, and Rob Beschizza, and the publisher is Jason Weisberger.
The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, normally shortened to The WELL, was launched in 1985. It is one of the oldest continuously operating virtual communities. By 1993 it had 7,000 members, a staff of 12, and gross annual income of $2 million. A 1997 feature in Wired magazine called it "The world's most influential online community." In 2012, when it was last publicly offered for sale, it had 2,693 members. It is best known for its Internet forums, but also provides email, shell accounts, and web pages. Discussion topics are organized into conferences that cover broad areas of interest. User anonymity is prohibited.
Mondo 2000 was a glossy cyberculture magazine published in California during the 1980s and 1990s. It covered cyberpunk topics such as virtual reality and smart drugs. It was a more anarchic and subversive prototype for the later-founded Wired magazine.
Mark Frauenfelder is an American blogger, illustrator, and journalist. He was editor-in-chief of the magazine MAKE and is co-owner of the collaborative weblog Boing Boing. Along with his wife, Carla Sinclair, he founded the Boing Boing print zine in 1988, where he acted as co-editor until the print version folded in 1997. There his work was discovered by Billy Idol, who consulted Frauenfelder for his Cyberpunk album. While designing Boing Boing and co-editing it with Sinclair, Frauenfelder became an editor at Wired from 1993–1998 and the "Living Online" columnist for Playboy magazine from 1998 to 2002. He is the co-editor of The Happy Mutant Handbook, and was the author and illustrator of Mad Professor. He is the author and illustrator of World's Worst and The Computer: An Illustrated History. He is the author of Rule the Web: How to Do Anything and Everything on the Internet—Better, Faster, Easier, and Made by Hand. He was interviewed on the Colbert Report in March 2007 and in June 2010.
An online magazine is a magazine published on the Internet, through bulletin board systems and other forms of public computer networks. One of the first magazines to convert from a print magazine format to an online only magazine was the computer magazine Datamation. Some online magazines distributed through the World Wide Web call themselves webzines. An ezine is a more specialized term appropriately used for small magazines and newsletters distributed by any electronic method, for example, by email. Some social groups may use the terms cyberzine and hyperzine when referring to electronically distributed resources. Similarly, some online magazines may refer to themselves as "electronic magazines", "digital magazines", or "e-magazines" to reflect their readership demographics or to capture alternative terms and spellings in online searches.
Wiley Wiggins is an American game designer and film actor. A native of Austin, Texas, he is the nephew of Lanny Wiggins, who was a member of Janis Joplin's early band, The Waller Creek Boys.
Jon Lebkowsky is a web consultant/developer, author, and activist who was the co-founder of FringeWare Review. FringeWare, an early attempt at ecommerce and online community, published a popular "magalog" called FringeWare Review, and a literary zine edited by Lebkowsky called Unshaved Truths. FringeWare's email list, called the FringeWare News Network, established an international following for the organization, which also opened a store in Austin, Texas.
Clayton Counts was an American musician and composer, a former DJ, and one half of the experimental band Bull of Heaven.
Paco Nathan is an American computer scientist and early engineer of the World Wide Web. Nathan is also an author and performance art show producer who established much of his career in Austin, Texas.
Richard Ira "Rick" Klaw, is an American editor, essayist, and bookseller.
IndieWire is a film industry and review website that was established in 1996. The site's focus was predominantly independent film, although its coverage has grown to "to include all aspects of Hollywood and the expanding universes of TV and streaming". IndieWire is part of Penske Media.
Weiser Antiquarian Books is the oldest occult bookstore in the United States. It specialises in books on Aleister Crowley and his circle, magic, mysticism, eastern religions and alternative spirituality. Its earlier New York incarnation, The Weiser Bookshop, was described by Leslie A. Shepherd as "perhaps the most famous occult bookstore in the U.S."
Kill Screen was a print and online magazine founded in 2009 by Jamin Warren and Chris Dahlen and owned by Kill Screen Media, Inc. It focused on video games and culture, but also included articles based on entertainment. The name is based on the video game term of the same name.
The Torist is a literary journal first released in late 2015, published on the Tor anonymity network. It features short stories, essays and poetry. One of the reasons for publishing on Tor was to return to the idea of rummaging through antiquarian shops – "It gets back to the time when you had to find The Evergreen Review in the stacks at the vintage bookstore" – and the zine can only be accessed through Tor, a dark web site. Its founders are the pseudonymous G.M.H., named after the reclusive 19th-century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Prof. Robert W. Gehl, who is a communication professor focusing on new media at the University of Utah. The two met on the dark-net social network Galaxy, and started collaborating in 2014, taking two years to produce the first issue of the journal. Submissions are made through the anonymous and open-source GlobaLeaks platform — intended for whistleblowing. The founders hope this anonymity can bolster creativity among submissions, and wish to show that anonymity online isn't only for illicit activities.
Signal to Noise (ISBN 978-0062515346) is a 1997 cyberpunk novel by Carla Sinclair published by Harper. This is the author's first novel; she had previously written non-fiction works. It is set in San Francisco. Tiffany Lee Brown, writing in Wired magazine, stated that the "cybercultural parody" reflects "distinctive perspective on the foibles of the wired life" and "caricatures" people in the San Francisco technology environment.
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