Launched in 1995 by Carey Earle, Tom Livaccari and Dan Pelson, Word Magazine was one of the earliest and most influential e-zines. For over five years, Word created original stories, interviews, games, applications, music, interactive objects and art, and community spaces. Word published new content daily, and each story was treated as a unique interface design experiment. Word was also a pioneer in the use of online advertising and was the first website to integrate "microsites" into brand advertising online.

Word's editorial team was originally led by Vibe founding editor Jonathan Van Meter and creative director Jaime Levy

Jaime Levy Russell

Jaime Levy Russell, formerly Jaime Levy, is an interface designer and user experience strategist who is best known for her groundbreaking new media projects in the 1990s...

. Marisa Bowe took over as Editor-in-Chief prior to the site's June 1995 launch and Yoshi Sodeoka

Yoshi Sodeoka

Yoshi Sodeoka is a Japan born artist and musician who has been producing art projects since the early 1990s. 1989 he moved to New York City to study art and design at the Pratt Institute....

 became Creative Director in early 1996. Daron Murphy

Daron Murphy

Daron Murphy is a film composer and musician, based in Brooklyn, NY.He composed musical scores for the feature length documentary films, and . In 2007 he scored the short film, , directed by Julia Stiles and starring Zooey Deschanel....

 was a founding senior editor. Later senior editors included Sabin Streeter and Rose Kernochan. Streeter, Bowe, Murphy, and Kernochan later co-edited a book of interviews with Americans about their jobs--inspired by Studs Terkel's Working, called Gig

Word won awards from I.D. Magazine

I.D. (magazine)

I.D. was a magazine covering the art, business and culture of design. It was published eight times a year by F+W Media....

 and Print Magazine

Print (magazine)

The publication, Print, A Quarterly Journal of the Graphic Arts, was a limited edition quarterly periodical begun in 1940 and continued under different names up to the present day as Print, a bimonthly American magazine about visual culture and design.In its current format, Print documents and...

, among others and was placed in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is a modern art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art and was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th century art...

, the Walker Art Center

Walker Art Center

The Walker Art Center is a contemporary art center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The Walker is considered one of the nation's "big five" museums for modern art along with the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the Hirshhorn...

 and the Museum of the Moving Image

Museum of the Moving Image

The Museum of the Moving Image was a museum of the history of technology and media, including cinema and its forerunners. MOMI was opened on 15 September 1988 by Prince Charles and became an instant international hit and winning 18 awards...

.

Word was originally owned by Icon CMT until its sale in April 1998 to Zapata Corporation. Zapata closed Word.com in August, 2000.

External links

• A Wired.com article on Word's first demise in 1998
• Kaitlin Quistgaard, "On the Edge and Under the Wing", Wired.com, September 2, 1998, article on acquisition of Word by a new owner
• SiSSYFiGHT 2000
  SiSSYFiGHT 2000
  Sissyfight 2000 was a turn-based strategy online game developed by the Word online magazine staff, including executive producer Marisa Bowe, lead programmer Ranjit Bhatnagar and art director Yoshi Sodeoka, with game designer Eric Zimmerman, written in Shockwave. It was launched in 2000.The...
  
   Turn-based strategy online game developed by the Word staff
• Screenshots of Word
• Fred the Webmate
  Fred the Webmate
  Fred The Webmate was a chatterbot created in 1998 for the defunct e-zine Word Magazine. It was inspired by an early computer program ELIZA, which attempted to mimic human conversation by use of a script....