Spider (internet magazine)
Encyclopedia
Pakistan
Pakistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan is a sovereign state in South Asia. It has a coastline along the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman in the south and is bordered by Afghanistan and Iran in the west, India in the east and China in the far northeast. In the north, Tajikistan...
by the DAWN group of newspapers, focusing on issues related to software/hardware
Computer hardware
Personal computer hardware are component devices which are typically installed into or peripheral to a computer case to create a personal computer upon which system software is installed including a firmware interface such as a BIOS and an operating system which supports application software that...
and Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
technologies. The magazine sported a tagline boasting it to be "Pakistan's Internet Magazine" till March 2005. Since most of the issues discussed in its leaves are mostly about things not just Internet, the tagline was removed and it is now recognized as Pakistan's IT magazine. A symbol that dons its cover pronouncing its identity is that of a mouse with eight limbs and a blinking red sensor as an eye over a web engulfed in a yellow circle, mostly found at the top-right corner of the publication.
Launch
The magazine was launched at the end of the year 1998 in the month of December and created a niche in the publishing market for itself as an internet magazine out of mere perception that not many lasted at the newsstands and all were picked off the shelves. It was however the first publishing venture that tied readers more closely to its interface by letting them comment and criticize their work. Reader's comments and criticism are a regular feature in the magazine since then. Completely printed in colour, it holds 140 pages including those containing advertisements. The current volume, the magazine is in, is the ninth. The basic aim and mission of the magazine is to inform its readers of the trends that happen on the information superhighwayInformation superhighway
The information superhighway or infobahnwas a popular term used through the 1990s to refer to digital communication systems and the Internet telecommunications network. It is associated with United States Senator and later Vice-President Al Gore....
that is gradually turning the world into a global village.
Magazine style and content
The monthly comprises cover stories and feature articles usually on the growth of the internet and how Information Technology is affecting Pakistanis. It is known to include thoughts and talks of and with the nation's leading technology evangelists and renowned names in the Pakistani Information TechnologyInformation technology
Information technology is the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications...
Industry.
The magazine has a trend of following up on its cover story accompanied by related topics packed into a single issue with regular features like HardTalk, E-Security and Tech Tips. In recent years, Spider magazine has put most of its focus on the recent online video gaming
Online game
An online game is a game played over some form of computer network. This almost always means the Internet or equivalent technology, but games have always used whatever technology was current: modems before the Internet, and hard wired terminals before modems...
trends in Pakistan, e-Governance and the Open Source movement.
With a readership of tens of thousands, the newspaper serves as a knowledge hub for young technology enthusiasts, thus attracting advertisements from Internet Services Providers and hardware vendors. It also attracts IT firms from all over Pakistan to help themselves gain ground by publicising their products via the magazine content.
Cover price
When the magazine began its steady climb into the world of publishing, its cover price was Rs. 35 per issue. Since March 2005, the cover price of the magazine has risen up to Rs. 50 per issue mainly because the magazine decided to include more pages for the people to read and extract information from.Staff
The founding Editor of the magazine was Dr Altamash KamalAltamash Kamal
Dr. Altamash Kamal is a pioneer in the technology sector in Pakistan. He is the Founder and CEO of Xiber.com, the first Internet Company in Pakistan. Xiber.com created the website for Dawn newspaper as well as DesiStore.com, the first and largest Pakistani internet store...
.
Reba Shahid
Reba Shahid
Reba Shahid is an information and communication technology -focused journalist from Pakistan. She is the Editor of the Spider and writes a fortnightly column on Information Technology for the BBC website in Urdu named Reba Ki Diary -Articles by Reba Shahid:* *...
took over as editor in May 2007. Editorial team include Amber Arshad and Tanya Abbas. The journal is published by Khwaja Kaleem Ahmed at the Pakistan Herald (Limited) Press for the Pakistan Herald Publications PLC since September 2011. He took over from Hoshang S. Master.
Former editors include Ali Ahsan Halai, and Zunaira Durrani
Offices
The publication comes under the supremacy of the DAWN group of newspapers and has offices all over the major cities of Pakistan. The main office is located at the Haroon House on Dr Ziauddin Ahmed Road in KarachiKarachi
Karachi is the largest city, main seaport and the main financial centre of Pakistan, as well as the capital of the province of Sindh. The city has an estimated population of 13 to 15 million, while the total metropolitan area has a population of over 18 million...
. Other offices are situated in Islamabad
Islamabad
Islamabad is the capital of Pakistan and the tenth largest city in the country. Located within the Islamabad Capital Territory , the population of the city has grown from 100,000 in 1951 to 1.7 million in 2011...
, Rawalpindi
Rawalpindi
Rawalpindi , locally known as Pindi, is a city in the Pothohar region of Pakistan near Pakistan's capital city of Islamabad, in the province of Punjab. Rawalpindi is the fourth largest city in Pakistan after Karachi, Lahore and Faisalabad...
, Lahore
Lahore
Lahore is the capital of the Pakistani province of Punjab and the second largest city in the country. With a rich and fabulous history dating back to over a thousand years ago, Lahore is no doubt Pakistan's cultural capital. One of the most densely populated cities in the world, Lahore remains a...
, Peshawar
Peshawar
Peshawar is the capital of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and the administrative center and central economic hub for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan....
, Multan
Multan
Multan , is a city in the Punjab Province of Pakistan and capital of Multan District. It is located in the southern part of the province on the east bank of the Chenab River, more or less in the geographic centre of the country and about from Islamabad, from Lahore and from Karachi...
, Quetta
Quetta
is the largest city and the provincial capital of the Balochistan Province of Pakistan. Known as the "Fruit Garden of Pakistan" due to the diversity of its plant and animal wildlife, Quetta is home to the Hazarganji Chiltan National Park, which contains some of the rarest species of wildlife in the...
, and Hyderabad.