* born magazine

born magazine, “an experimental venue marrying literary arts and interactive media. Original projects are brought to life every three months through creative collaboration between writers and artists.”

A for-real online magazine, not just a print magazine online.

Browsing is difficult because coming back to the main page (mother.html!) invokes a spinning “Born is” or “Please” advertisement that you have to click through.

There is a great lookup feature at the top of the main page. It scrolls through their database and allows searching on year, project title, author, artist, genre. I like this lookup a lot. I’d like to see many other sites using it.

I wanted to know the earliest year of publication – 1997. Looking at the multimedia experiments from 1997 – the tools have come a long way.

The site makes me wonder about the book format. I know how to read books. I’m not sure I know how to “read” multimedia experiments. I felt more like I was “eating” them, like bonbons. And I didn’t have the correct versions installed and didn’t have sound enabled, which limited my experience. I turned off a lot of them midway, disengaged.

I’m uneasy with floating text that comes and goes. Text should stay put, I should come and go.