There was excitement amongst fans of Web 2.0i Ghia last night with news that Sniff Petrol is to become an online magazine. Older readers may remember Sniff Petrol’s previous attempt to reinvent itself as a blog, and also recall that it was shit. However, there are no such worries this time around as the neterweb’s orangiest car-based nonsense site hurtles headlong into the rush to be the latest new automotive webzine that is claiming to be the first even though it probably isn’t.
“These are very exciting times,” said Sniff Petrol marketing director, Thisisa Madeupname. “Old school paper magazines are dead, webzines are the future. Of course, Sniff Petrol has never actually been a paper magazine but we did print off some old editions from the website and make them into a magazine just so we could have a meeting with some design consultants from Shoreditch and decide that it was dead”.
The beauty of the webzine according to Madeupname is that, using the latest computer technology, it can replicate many of the features of an old fashioned print publication. “Technology has thankfully got to the point where it can at last pointlessly replicate old fashioned things instead of looking forward,” he says. “What we’re going to offer here is things like page numbers on the bottom and, most excitingly, a graphical interface that looks like the pages of a magazine turning. It was developed by the same company that worked out how to put cassette hiss onto MP3s. We’re also very excited by a new feature that will exactly replicate the first time you open a new print magazine by allowing a big virtual pile of annoying adverts for car loans to fall out onto your desktop”.
However, new Sniff Petrol won’t be all about just inexplicably trying to make your computer look like a magazine. Madeupname promises some radical innovations too. “How many times have you been reading a magazine and thought, I’m enjoying listening to some of my own music in the background, but what I really wish is that the magazine itself would play me some repetitive tune that I don’t really like? We can provide the solution to that. And, without wishing to give too much away, I think we’ll have a pleasant surprise for anyone who’s ever thought, Damn, I wish it took longer to turn the pages of this paper magazine, and if only some of the content didn’t appear properly on the page and I had to leave the magazine for five minutes whilst it re-loaded”.
The new Sniff Petrol webzine will be completely free, until we have to start charging for something that basically no one’s going to pay for because it’s on a computer.
STOP PRESS: Sniff Petrol isn’t going to be a webzine after all. It was a bollocks idea.
