In the mid-nineties, www.word.com was my favorite website in the world. It was a sort of online magazine, though it wasn’t really made up of articles - it tended to lean toward publishing weird little interactive hypertext stories, comics, vignettes, found art, memoirs, and first-generation Shockwave stuff (though there was a fair amount of regular prose, too). I remember how weird and creative the design was in spite of all being constrained by a 28.8kpbs internet - one story called “Blood Brothers” was bordered with a ton of red text 0’s, reflecting red blood cells, while many stories involved hand-drawn comic-style graphics to illustrate and expand them. Word.com turned me on to many great comics like Tony Millionaire’s Maakies years before I lived in a city that had an Alternative Weekly.
I was always surprised that they managed to score some high-profile contributors for what was essentially a first-generation webzine - I remember certain stories having mini-scores by DJ Spooky and Dan the Automator that would play while you read them, and I also recall a story by Thurston Moore (of Sonic Youth) and an interactive “Paper Doll Fun” Shockwave thing by Dame Darcy (of comic book Meat Cake fame).
The editors/creators of Word.com went on to edit the book Gig: Americans talk about their jobs at the turn of the century, which seemed to have some success - it’s still in print a few years later - but the website stopped being updated and abruptly vanished in '99 or so. I miss the hell out of it, and fondly remember it as the perfect encapsulation of that time in '95 or so when the Internet seemed like the most magical and futuristic thing out there, my way out of a proverbial one-horse town via modem.
I’ve tried to find contact information for the former owners, because I’d like to make an offer to host all of the content and archives and everything in pepertuity for posterity, but I can’t seem to find any contact information for them online.
Anyone else remember Word? Anyone have a favorite article or segment? Anyone know what happened to it?