Kanye and Kerning, Pixies and Pixels

Last weekend I posted an article about Idiomag, the new web-based 'zine launching in October. To my surprise, someone from Idio replied. Since his comment was posted to the original article, and you are almost certainly too lazy to click back there, I'll reprint it here:

Ed said...

Hi!

I'm one of those "somebody" behind idiomag :) Thus thought I'd answer a few of your questions.

When we launch we will be covering mainly Music and Design/Digital Art content, but expanding rapidly to cover most bases by Christmas.

We are a kinda "glossy" rss-aggregator, although rather than taking a straight feed we actively license articles from major "content providers" - websites and communities.

I hope Fay didn't freak you out too much - she's honestly not a creepy girl :p

The system has function which smoothes the flow of articles (on launch) - so you don't get overly swamped each day. When launched we will be working with about 15 large content providers so you should be getting a reasonable flow of articles daily, while we continue to expand our content offerings.

Finally the age thing is relevant for regulations about what content we could potentially give to certain age groups (sex, drugs and rock'n'roll.. well maybe not the last). Plus we can always say happy birthday!

All the best, and if you have any more questions pop us and email via the website :)

Ed

Emoticons aside, it was nice to get some answers as to what sort of stuff they plan to include. Seems like most of this material should be on their site, though. And it saddens me a little that they'll be relying on external sources for all their content. I don't know how a magazine can establish an identity, let alone a voice, when their stories are all available elsewhere. I guess they're hoping to accomplish this through graphics and interface alone, but I probably wouldn't spend a lot of time with a newspaper which simply republished AP wire reports, however shiny it looked. And I am a musician who works in design. So I would seem to be among the intended targets.

I'm not certain why they felt it necessary to respond, since the post about them was sandwiched between a YouTube video of Elmo and vacation pics from a year ago. I guess people take blogs pretty seriously these days.

And I'm sure, by the way, that Fay is lovely.

Ed's post initially gave me the sort of feeling you might expect to have if you were making faces behind someone's back, and they suddenly turned around and caught you. But I reread my post, and it wasn't mean-spirited or anything. Maybe a bit sardonic, but not outright mean. That's, uh, not how I roll. Except for articles pertaining to Horatio Sanz. Those are mean.

I still plan to check it out when they launch. And if they want to offer me some swag, or syndicate The Moon Topples, I'll probably be very enthusiastic about it. Otherwise, it still sounds like the kind of thing that'll be neat for a couple of days, and then maybe not so much.

I also heard back from Elmo, but he mostly flamed me, so I'm not gonna post that here. You should be ashamed of yourself, Elmo. I understand that child-stardom takes a toll on the psyche, but we expect a certain level of decorum here at The Moon Topples. Even from meth addicts.