Word.com

» see word.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

word.com sat in a part of the web i could read about but never really lived in. in 1995 i was eleven years old and three years from my first modem, and word was an English-language art project made in downtown Manhattan for people who already thought of the browser as a canvas. by the time i was online and my English was good enough to follow it, word had been dead for years. i came to it the way you come to a magazine that folded before you could ever have subscribed.

it launched in June 1995 as one of the earliest true webzines, edited from just before it went live by Marisa Bowe, who had come out of Echo, the New York answer to the WELL. the idea was that a story online did not have to look like a story on paper. every piece got its own layout and, often enough, its own little program to hold it together. word ran comics from cartoonists like Ben Katchor, and it built a browser game, Sissyfight 2000, that people still talk about. it was also early to selling ads on a website, which is part of why it mattered and part of why it died.

Icon CMT owned it at first. in April 1998 it was sold to Zapata, an old oil-and-fishing outfit that spent a stretch of the late 90s trying to turn into an internet company. that did not last. in August 2000, as the ad market word had helped invent came apart, Zapata closed it. the work outlived the site: pieces of word ended up in the permanent collections of SFMOMA and the Walker Art Center.

~ the dossier ~

~ the experiment ~

the thing that made word hard to explain then and easy to admire now is that it never settled on a template. most sites, even good ones, find a layout and repeat it. word treated repetition as a failure. an article about grief might scroll one way, an interview might be a set of doors you clicked through. that is exhausting to run daily, and word ran it daily for five years on the budget of a small magazine.

~ what got buried with it ~

when word closed, a specific idea closed with it: that a webzine could be a design studio instead of a content mill. the model that won was the template, the same page repeated forever. word was proof the other path existed and could be beautiful. it just could not be cheap, and cheap is what the web decided to be.

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