[plug] starting a linux mag?

[John Knight]

G'day all!
Well I was hoping this would be a team project, so if we set upa wwebpage 
with some kind of forum system, that'd probably help this all out (didn't 
someone suggest that earlier?). Anyway, onto what content I was thinking of:

We have the usual inbox/opinion sections, articles written by people working 
for the mag about current issues, a tech help part, all of the usual things 
in a PC mag, with a few special things of our own. I was thinking of a 
'Project of the Month' section, where people send in their project ideas 
with a detailed explanation of what their proggy/project would do, and over 
the page would be feedback on last month's project. This would help spur on 
developers and help people starting projects get a team together, plus they 
could get useful feedback for their idea (provided they can wait a month).

The kind of target audience I was thinking of would be the kind that read 
magazines like APC and PC User etc, intermediate but not advanced. Advanced 
people already have enough help as it is, so a few articles on the usual, 
'how to set up your firewall with <insert acronym> encryption' for the mahor 
tech heads, and things geared towards the usual games, desktop, multimedia, 
productivity, graphics, etc, for the less learned of us. ;)

There is a growing audience of people that have never used Linux before and 
don't really know much about Windows either that are jumping n on the scene 
that need helping too, so perhaps about 5-10 pages of the mag dedicated to 
the newbies would be a reader-drawer.

With the CDs, everyone's after the latest distro release or updates, so 
that'd be good to include, plus the other mags tend to shy away from 
multimedia and games on their cover CDs, with the usual filler being SSH 
updates etc. If we cater more for the average user, then not only would we 
be targeting a bigger reader audience (I hope), but we'd be drawing in the 
newer crowd to Linux, the kind that use Mandrake. ;)

Do we have a market for it? Of courses we do, what has PC Powerplay got over 
PC Gamer US/UK? A great big price difference, Australian currency usage, 
local advertising, use of Australian speech, local goings-on that are 
actually useful for Aussies, the list goes on........ why should Linux be 
any different?

Make lunch, not war.





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