The NWT started as a chronicle of AlphaWorld, then Active Worlds. I think that when Dave Gobel ("Da5id" in Active Worlds) got me started doing the paper he pictured AlphaWorld becoming something like "The Street" in SnowCrash. He probably thought it would be THE Virtual Reality of the future. I was supposed to chronicle the events that took place there.

So the format I came up with was somewhat like a real newspaper only nowhere near as frequent. Each issue was static, so that once you had read it, you were waiting for the next issue to hear anything more. The advantage to this model was *supposed to be* that you could catch the flavor of a certain time in AW by reading the paper from that time. The static model for the NWT was a real mistake, unless I were to devote my life to doing nothing but that.

Events in VR transpire much more quickly than I could keep up with them! So each paper got delayed either because (1) I hadn't written up some event, or (2) we were so late already that we thought we'd wait for some upcoming event.

In our new format we'll just post things as they are ready, which should make these pages a lot more fun to visit...hopefully each time you visit there will be fresh news to read. We'll archive articles under the month that they first appeared, and have a search feature once we get enough articles archived this way.

The other thing that's new here is that we will cover all and any VR formats. Initially we'll add Ultima Online and other gaming environments, and The Palace. If you spend time in a VR environment we're not covering, submit an article about it!