User:Tale

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Tale is an online alias of Simon Vandore, a Scottish-Australian writer and journalist.

I picked the name Tale in 1997 because I had many stories to tell after 15 months of overseas travel with a bicycle and tent. "Tale" was the shortest and first available synonym of "story" I found in an online game called Subspace.

[edit] Internet resumé

I first encountered the Internet in 1993 when I was editor-in-chief of Interpellator, the student newspaper at Charles Sturt University in Bathurst, NSW. It made instant sense to me, because I had read William Gibson's cyberpunk fiction. David Gilliver, a computing student who helped with the student newspaper, explained more of it to me. Sensing an impending collision of Internet, cyberpunk and the techno music favoured by my sub-editor Stuart Ridley, we renamed the newspaper "Cyberlator" for one issue and filled it with cyberpunk poetry, Gibson quotes, computer game reviews and :-) smileys. Nobody understood, but it was cool.

When not travelling in the period 1994-2000, I was a journalist with Australia's biggest-selling computer magazine APC [1] (at Australian Consolidated Press). My speciality was the Internet and I wrote most of APC's articles about the impending boom, while running the first commercial magazine website in Australia. I was often interviewed on radio about the newfangled Internet.

By the end of the 1990s, other technology journalists had caught up to my Internet knowledge. I became a general features writer, then senior journalist with APC's spin-off website newswire.com.au (part of ninemsn), with a weekly opinion column called "Vandore" where I predicted a giant Internet stock bust. When it came, newswire.com.au was unfortunately one of its victims.

I took a job as online editor with the respected medical weekly Australian Doctor [2] at Reed Business Information, but left after 18 months because I lacked control over the project. However, the veteran newspeople at Australian Doctor turned me into a more disciplined journalist. I also gained more insight into running websites, analysing traffic stats and writing for a web audience.

Hoping to escape the pigeonhole of specialist journalism, I scored a job with the Seven Network's [3] short-lived online joint venture AOL|7. A few months later, Seven took its websites back in-house and I found myself working in its Sydney newsroom, running mainstream websites and writing the original Wikipedia entry for my new profession: online producer. Note: I do not speak for the Seven Network, and all my Wikipedia edits are done on my own time, independent of my employer.

[edit] View of Wikipedia

For better or worse, I prefer to live my life on frontiers. There are few left in the physical world, but plenty in the virtual, Wikipedia among them.

Tale 19:22, 28 September 2005 (UTC)