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I seem to have neglected to mention that I was on a panel at WorldCon. I think this was my first WorldCon panel, actually. It was about "SF on the Web," and was billed in the pocket program guide as being a "URL swap and review panel."

Now, I have a theory about panels. Actually, I have many theories about panels, but the relevant one here is that any panel which can deteriorate into the panelists and audience listing their favorite whatevers will do so.

Clearly many people in fandom like such panels. You can build a good recommended-reading list from all the panels that are all about listing favorite books in a given category. But I find such panels boring these days; I just don't consider a panel to be the right format for providing a list of books and/or authors. A Web page is a good format for such a list: easily reachable by most people, easily printable, can be accessed from libraries, can be easily updated, rearranged, split into multiple pages by category, etc. (If it's backed by a database, even better!) A paper handout or an article published in a magazine is a reasonably good format for a favorites list; readers can carry it with them. But saying the names of authors and books in front of a big audience seems to me to be a waste of everyone's time, especially since the person saying a given name usually has to repeat it two to three times and then spell it.

And usually the only information given in those contexts is the author and/or title. Panelists almost never explain why they like a given work or author; it's almost always "Oh, and here's another book that fits the broad category suggested by the title of our panel. Oh, and here's another one. And I just thought of another one. Also this one. And that one."

I've done this on panels myself; it's very easy to fall into, and in fact panel audiences often request it. "Can you recommend any books that fit category X?" Panels are often structured around brainstorming booklists: I was on a feminist SF panel at WisCon, the point of which was mostly to recommend feminist sf for younger readers.

So anyway, I had nightmare visions of three-quarters of the panel's time being taken up with panelists saying "Here's another one of my favorite websites:" and then saying the site's name, and then spelling the URL. Slowly. Several times. "H, P, T, T, no wait I mean T, T, P, colon, backslash, backslash—yes?" Audience member: "Don't you mean H, T, T, P, colon, slash, slash?" Panelist: "Yes, that's what I said." Audience member: "No, you said—" It would be excruciating.

So I contacted my fellow panelists via email ahead of time (not nearly as far ahead of time as I'd originally intended, alas) and asked them for the URLs that they were going to mention, so I could put together a paper handout to distribute at the panel.

It turned out there were differences of opinion about what the panel was going to be about. Some panelists, I think, expected it to focus on reviewing various sites (actually talking about them, not just listing URLs); others expected it to be a general discussion of the state of sf online, and of business models, and so on.

But most of the panelists provided me with a dozen or so URLs apiece, and then the night before the panel I made a handout. I decided to fill in a few gaps by adding a dozen or so URLs of my own, but things got really out of hand: I kept finding new stuff I thought deserved to be on such a list. I finally narrowed it down to "few" enough items that they fit on two sides of a sheet of paper (in landscape mode, with two columns). Then I printed it at Kinko's and photocopied it. And during the panel itself, every time we referred to a site we could say "The URL is on the handout."

It was probably entirely unnecessary, for two reasons: First, there are literally dozens of sites out there that already provide big listings of SF on the Web; and second, given a site name, it's trivial to Google it and find it without having to know the URL.

But I'd already made the list by the time I thought that through. And I figured if stuff came up during the panel that wasn't on the list, it would be nice to be able to update it, so I put it on the Web.

So here it is: the list of SF sites from the WorldCon 2002 "SF on the Web" panel.

It paid off in the end; both audience and panelists praised the idea of having a paper handout, and it meant we almost never had to give a URL, and it saved the audience a lot of time 'cause they didn't have to write things down.

I probably won't update it, though.

PostScript: the panel ended up being a mix of various things, under Jim Kelly's able moderation. We listed our favorite sites; we discussed some of them; we talked about business models. Attendance was fairly sparse (possibly fewer than showed up for the online-magazines panel the next day, but we had a much bigger room so it was hard to compare), but there were people from Locus Online and scifi.com in the room, who chimed in with some interesting bits, and overall I think it went about as well as could be expected.