I Miss Zines - Mind Map #3

I have been told that my mind map posts are "too long" and that people can't get through them.  I was initially annoyed with this, but then I realized that I, too, tend to zone out on blog posts that go on for a while.  I read a lot of books, as do some of the people who commented on the length of the mind map posts.  So, it's not an attention thing - I think it's a screen thing.  While we might read a lot on the screen, we like to click - the Internet is an impatient medium.  So this one is split into 3 pieces.

And this one is about Zines.  As I've written about before, blogging has brought the power of the pen (virtual pen) to the largest population in history.  Before this was the leaflet, Samizdat and the Zine - handwritten, small batch offset pressed or with the advent of the photocopier.

I made my first zine in late 1970s, at the age of 13.  It was called the Jim Times.  It was self expression.  That, plus a post office box acquired a few years later, led to the BVI Newsletter which came of age in the age of Zines.

A guy named Mike Gunderloy was Google then.  His zine, Factsheet Five, was a great lesson in open format and scalability.  Mike went from his zine reviews being four pages folded over and stapled to nearly 100 pages with tiny type.  Almost killed the poor guy.

Then came BVI-Web and, later, this blog.

But I miss Zines and that is this week's mind map:

This blog gets more readers every day than my zine did in a year.  At the highpoint of my zine, you would find me in a room full of paper, manically stapling together 50 to 100 copies of BVI-Central (The zine's name at its height). 

This was a lot of work.  But the care one put into it reflected in the care one put into the writing as well.  I tend to blog in the morning in the time between I am ready to leave for the office and when my wife becomes ready.  I used to write for BVI-Central between 4 and 6 pm every day and then assemble these writings monthly - taking a best of the group - and having Ann Miner comment and edit before they went out.

I'm going to follow this up with two shorter-than-previous-mind-map posts about the pros and cons of blogging v. zines.

technorati tags:mindmap, gunderloy, zines

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Comments

[Mike Gunderloy]

Now, if only I could have turned FF into a multi-billion dollar business instead of a nervous breakdown....

Ah well, thanks for the nostalgia :)

[Jim Benson]

You earned it, my friend.

Sorry you had to wait 15 years for it.

Readers can pretty much blame Mike Gunderloy for Jim Benson's regular writing. And sometimes he really cursed himself for it.

I remember one zine review he gave me the simultaneously sincerest and most backhanded compliment I've ever received. After years of getting my zines, my writing style changed considerably. Mike said of one issue, "I'm shocked to find I'm actually starting to look forward to [BVI-Central].

Heh.