Omni Internet

A bold experiment in interactive journalism

• Omni Internet
• http://www.omnimag.com
• Pam Weintraub, Editor
• Some Netscape 2.0 extensions

mni magazine began publishing in 1978 and quickly became known for a unique blend of science coverage, futurology and science fiction. Not surprisingly, Omni was one of the first magazines to stake a claim in cyberspace, setting up on America Online and later on the Web. Now the magazine no longer even publishes in print, except for an occasional newsstand-only issue, but it's far from dying. Earlier this month Omni revamped its Web site into a big and bold interactive experience with all of the print magazine's old flair.

Omni Internet's format mimics the paper Omni, with such familiar sections as Continuum, a collection of short science articles, and Antimatter, which covers "edge" science: UFO's, mysterious beasts and the like. There are also longer feature stories as well as fiction by some of the best writers in the genre, a feature that Omni has always been famous for.

Beyond simple text on the screen, though, Omni Internet has a number of features designed to take advantage of the Web's capabilities as a new medium. Re: is an area where "some of the world's greatest, most interesting and most diverse thinkers" post e-mails to each other in which they discuss, apparently, Important Things. There is also a forum where, via bulletin board-style postings, readers can carry on conversations with various famous personalities. And almost every evening there are online chat sessions with such luminaries as Arthur C. Clarke, Stephen Jay Gould and H. R. Giger. The site also retains previous Omni Online features such as science cartoons and a small bookstore.

Omni Internet's content is every bit as good as the original magazine's -- informative, fun, and it provides many eye-opening views to the stranger parts of our world. The stories are matched by high-quality, yet tasteful, graphics and smart layout. The site is big, easily capable of providing hours of good reading, and its diversity guarantees that just about everyone will find at least one bit that makes them say, "Ah ha!"

Unfortunately, the site has a number of Web kinks that need to be fixed up. A few links are mismatched, some words are broken here and there, and the forms for posting to the forums have a few bugs. While most of these errors are easy to ignore, the Continuum section has some severe handicaps. Here animated graphics conflict with javascript banner messages, and certain frames won't go away when the navigation bar is clicked, turning what could have been slick design into a confusion of Web pages. As soon as these shake-down problems are corrected, Omni Internet will be every bit as slick as its previous incarnations.

I've always enjoyed Omni, and now it's FREE! -- Brooks

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