By Casey Muller
www.spark-online.com is
a rebellious, hip, and somewhat meandering
forum for amateur writing of many sorts. Their tagline is "exploring
electronic consciousness", and they seem to publish a wide variety
of
articles that are interesting without being very informative.
The colors of the site scream "cool", and the layout is
well done and
easy to use. Clearly there is someone who has put a lot of time into
the aesthetics, and it paid off. Looking back over past issues, it
is
clear that the designers have managed to change the look each month
while keeping a consistent overall feel. Quite a feat.
There seem to be a few dozen contributors, all writing with a definite
counter-culture slant, and generally playing with the medium. Clearly
the founders are attempting to create an online community, but it
is
not clear to me what the uniting theme is. Each article individually
is interesting, and some are quite insightful, so to find out if
anyone cared, I checked the discussion forums. This was the one part
of the site that made me think about becoming a regular. They were
low-to-moderately active, to the point where you could easily check
only once a week and still read everything. Still, they definitely
favored those who knew each other from other forums.
I'm pretty close to the ideal target audience for spark-online: a
liberal young college student with a healthy distrust of the
establishment, and plenty of time spent online. Nonetheless, I was
not
sucked in. The writing was good, the site was pretty, but I felt no
cohesive whole. I'm sure that if I personally knew and respected any
member of the contributing staff, that alone would be enough to draw
me in, but the webpage just doesn't have grabbing power over the
general internet community.