Joining the trend

There's trouble a brewin'.

In the midst of all the furor surrounding MySpace, I decided to take a further look into it and see the good beyond the hype. There are obviously a lot of young people using MySpace, so why is that?

A lot of it comes from the fact that the safe harbors for young people to congregate are continually shrinking. There is no longer the soda fountain to hang out at and meet people. Drive-in theaters have gone the way of the horse and carriage. Malls are becoming places where criminals can shop for clothes and shop for wanton youth. So where can kids go?

They go online.

Now, you don't have to be the only goth kid in your high school in Idaho, you can know and 'meet' a whole group of goth kids on MySpace.

And yes, MySpace suffers from the same issues that the mall does. There are people who will take advantage of MySpace. People who will use the networking functions of the website to look to satisfy their depraved needs. And, like the mall, when parents and guardians let their kids run amok, uneducated, unsupervised, someone's going to get hurt.

So what am I doing about this?

I've set up my own MySpace. I want to experience it from the inside. I want to see if I can reach another market and find people who might be interested in Electric Velocipede who might not know anything about it through other means.

This is not about 'getting' more traffice/readers/subscribers. This is about earning more traffic/readers/subscribers. You can paint the users of MySpace as naive as you want, but they are not stupid. There is no reason for them to read Electric Velocipede unless they want to.

What I'm doing here is giving people the opportunity to even know about the zine in the first place. I can hope that I set my MySpace up well enough that people will find their way to it through searches. I can add friends to my account like F&SF, Slush God, Tobias Buckell, and Gwenda, that might lead others to me.

Then I have to continue to make a good product so that people who make the effort to support me are not disappointed with their decision to do so.

Tags: MySpace, Electric Velocipede, science fiction, Slush God, Tobias Buckell, Gwenda Bond, writers, writing, publishing