Digerati Home Page

Infohaus, a "meeting place" of information sellers and purchasers. Primary attraction is the electronic payment system which allows authors to get paid for their work; fees flow into your credit card account. The downside of this is Infohaus's poor presentation of sellers - your work will get lost amid the jumble. (Another downside is the negatives associated with First Virtual, a company that spreads, as a pathetic competive strategy for their business, FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) about privacy of other company's payment schemes when their payment scheme suffers from much more serious problems. See this link at C2 for more information. Ecash is a much better payment scheme, from the perspective of privacy, though it's difficult to use.)

Enterzone Other eZines List

RealPoetic, which Another Chicago Magazine called "The best little magazine on the internet." We've published Hal Sirowitz, William Talcott, Tuli Kupferberg, Buddy Kold, Barry Silesky, Alfred Vitale, Richard Kostelanetz, Bart Plantenga, myself, Sal Salasin, Tsuarah Litsky, Carol Wierzbicki, Connie Deanovich and many many more.

We run RealPoetik as a listserv because email is a lowest comman denominator.

To subscribe: email to listserv@listserv.wln.com, nothing in Subject:, single line of text: subscribe rpoetik.

Publishes twice a week, about two pages each time.

The Hawk -- An Arts and Literary Ezine for the World Wide Web

Recommended HTML Coding Guides

Which should we recommend? O'Reilly?

This site has be suggested as a great site for learning HTML and CGI.

Other Resources

The Jane Austen site.where a lot of time and effort has been given to put many of the novels in to HTML, with interesting commentary, bibilography and so on. It shows how the Web can be used as a enriched resource, with value added to the text by the people who did hours of work to make the book more rewarding to read because we know more about what is going on in it. Some one said (was it Barthes?) that great writers make great readers - guidence from good teachers can help make us better readers too. -- Jerrold Maddox

Joe Grant has a Book Information and Review Service.

Creative Coalition of Artists is a coalition of artists fighting censorship on the Net. Originally formed in response to censorship at AOL, the organization has recently expanded it's focus to include the net as a whole. Site maintains a bulletin board for writing postings, a board where poems and responses to them may be posted, links to anti-censorship resources, and an EZine, Free Cuisenart.

The Electronic Poetry Center, a sort of hang-out space for writers maintained by the Poetics program at the University of Buffalo. It has ongoing on-line forums, a library of ezines, archives from a poetry mailing list, and general writer schmoozalia.

If you're interested in a threading tool for the Web which allows dynamic creation of new posts, check out my site. There is a Web resources area that anyone can post to.

Various proposals have emerged related to rating web content. This should be of concern to authors, because they're going to get rated. See this document for a discussion of some advanced techniques and links to some less sophisticaed techniques.

Web Server Companies

C2 is an excellent access provider company that sells privacy as its core competence. In addition, they're technically quite sophisticated. If you wanted to publish some sensitive work anonymously, this would be the place to do it. Even if you didn't want to publish anonymously, you could use their site (their rates are decent) and they might be able to help you use ecash.

What is Digerati?

Increasingly, creative writers (poets, novelists, short story writers, etc.) are bypassing the mainstream media establishment and publishing their work directly on the world wide web.

The new electronic medium is largely in flux. Digerati is a mailing list for discussion of the technical challenges and experiences of writers. Example topics are tips on HTML coding, pointers to emerging methods for compensating the writer directly from the reader (digital cash), ways of increasing readership (cross references, getting into ezine and other indexes), and copyright.

I'm not a writer, other than plinking away at a computer science thesis. The genesis of digerati was the very positive experience of a poet friend who's been uploading various finished and in-progress pieces to a WWW server machine at our lab. Although she can make her way around PCs and knows a bit about UNIX, she's not "technical." Her talents are streams of richer (than mine) perceptions of the world, and the ability to capture them in writing. As an experiment, I helped her set up a "home" page, pointed her in the direction of the rudiments of HTML, and she's taken it from there. I'll leave it to her to describe the specifics, but it seemed like it might be a good idea to try to start a dialogue between others in similar positions.

Subscribing to Digerati.

To subscribe to digerati, send email to digerati-request@ai.mit.edu. In the body of the message, include the word "subscribe".

To unsubscribe to digerati, send email to

Other Stuff.

National Writer's Union position paperregarding self-publishing in cyberspace.

The Bay Area Bookstore is tangentially related to digerati.