ZineZone

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

~ the eulogy ~

ZineZone was a free publishing network for amateur magazines, which in 1999 was a reasonable thing to build a company around. You picked a zone, you got a page under /users/, and the front door promoted whatever the editors liked that week. The tagline printed across the masthead was "home for trailblazers everywhere," and the logo was a purple oval with a black Z cut through it.

Free hosting is the one category on this list I was actually inside. I was fifteen in 1999, on a modem in Turkey, and a site that let you publish without paying anyone was the entire premise of being online at that age. ZineZone was not the one I found. It was English-language, American, promoted through American ad networks, and the free host that reached me was the one everybody reached. That is most of what happened to ZineZone, told from the wrong end.

By July 1999 ZineZone Corporation was listed in CMGI's annual filing as a majority-owned subsidiary, described as a network for early adopters of new forms of entertainment and content. CMGI was the dot-com era's largest incubator, and being inside it meant a brand had roughly the lifespan of the strategy that bought it.

~ the dossier ~

~ twelve zones ~

The zone selector on the front page, as of February 1999, offered Collecting, Culture, Digital Tech, Extreme Sports, Food and Drink, Living, Mind Body, Politics, Sciences, Sports and Rec, Travel, and Wealth. That is the whole taxonomy of what a 1999 portal thought people wrote about. The navigation bar beside it had Zines, Trailblazers, Chat and MyZine. There was a daily quiz run off somebody else's server, an e-postcard sender, and banner ads served through AdSmart, which CMGI also owned.

The member pages are the part worth keeping. A capture from March 2000 promotes a user zine at /users/travelstuff with a one-line editorial blurb written by a human being: leave the chilly winter nights behind with the help of this travel guide. That is a staff member reading a stranger's travel page and writing it up for the front door, on a venture-funded site, for free.

~ the name before the name ~

On 12 December 1998 the same site answered under a different brand. The title read "the [password]", lowercase, square brackets included, and the domain was thepassword.com. Eight weeks later, on 8 February 1999, both thepassword.com and zinezone.com were serving an identical 8,213-byte page titled "ZineZone Home". The old domain kept pointing at the new brand for years afterward, including the ad server at ads.thepassword.com that ZineZone was still calling in 1999.

No publication covered the rename. There is no press release and no trade note anywhere in the dot-com histories. The only record that the [password] became ZineZone is two captures of the same filesystem under two names, which is the shape most small deaths and most small renames actually take.

~ somebody else's goodbye ~

CMGI launched iCAST in 1999 as a hundred-million-dollar entertainment company, then folded ZineZone and Signature Networks into it to give it something to publish. The brand went first: zinezone.com was still titled "ZineZone" on 4 March 2000 and was serving "icast.com" by 20 May. On 14 November 2000 CMGI announced it was exiting the entertainment portal business and would shut iCAST by the end of January 2001 if no buyer appeared. None did.

What is left is a 1,147-byte page that sat on ZineZone's own domain until 2002. "Sorry you missed us! iCAST Corporation has closed down its Website and is in the process of winding down the business. We sincerely thank our users and partners for their past support, and we hope you've enjoyed the interactive entertainment content and services we delivered." Signed by the CEO of iCAST Corporation, with [email protected] for questions. The writers who had published zines under twelve headings on that server got a thank-you note addressed to somebody else's customers.

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