Welcome to the very first issue of Music Web watch - the successor to Music & Vision's 1999 series Site Seeing. Although the format will be a little different, Tuesdays will continue to be devoted to finding our way around the musical parts of the internet.

Hoping that your New Year celebrations lived up to expectation, I can tell you that mine were, to say the least, traumatic and dramatic. Leaving aside my personal experiences, though, many M&V readers will have been greeted with the same surprise as me on New Year's Day - as shown here. Yes, it's Music & Vision's very own Y2K problem, which catapulted us straight into the 192nd century ... (our apologies if you tried and failed to access the magazine during the first few hours of the year 2000).

Minor problems too at GMN, where their normally personalised weekly newsletter from president Phil Wilson arrived addressed to 'Dear //Firstname//' ... I suspect this was due to operator error rather than the 'millennium bug'. Interesting, though ... if I know an email has been generated automatically, I would prefer it not to begin 'Dear Keith' ...

So how will Music Web watch differ from Site Seeing?

Firstly, we plan to have more special features, exploring particular areas of the musical world. We hope that more of these features will be written by guest writers, bringing their own expertise and knowledge. (Hopefully you won't become so fed up with my company each Tuesday as you may have been last year.)

Secondly, we have a year's worth of Site Seeing material and other Music & Vision articles which we hope to make more accessible, so that if, for example, we feature a new music magazine, you'll be able to explore relevant web links from previous articles as well as new material presented, without having to search or to click through a year's worth of old articles. This will work something like this:

The WholeNote Magazine is a classical music magazine published in Toronto by Allan Pulker, appearing on the net and also in print form, ten times per year. WholeNote includes Toronto's only comprehensive monthly classical and contemporary concert listings source.

Relevant links >>

We also hope to provide a facility for you to add new links online, so that if you read a feature and know other relevant sites, you'll be able to share them.

Copyright © 4 January 2000 by Keith Bramich, Suckley, Worcestershire, UK