In his first Surf Report for The Big Idea, writer and comedian Jon Bridges offers up a beginners' guide to New Zealand arts websites. Well, the beginning to a beginners' guide - his scope and domain as columnist includes any website by, for or about New Zealand artists, so one column doesn't quite cover it.

In his first Surf Report for The Big Idea, writer and comedian Jon Bridges offers up a beginners' guide to New Zealand arts websites. Well, the beginning to a beginners' guide - his scope and domain as columnist includes any website by, for or about New Zealand artists, so one column doesn't quite cover it. Never visited Amplifier before? Here's your chance, though it might pay to have your credit card handy -TBI Surf Report 14/2/07 by Jon Bridges

What websites are there for New Zealand artists and what are they like? This is my first piece as a The Big Idea columnist whose scope and domain is all those websites by, for and about New Zealand artists, so I thought a good way to start - for you and for me - would be to take a quick tour of the websites that fit this bill.

First of all I went to amplifier.co.nz, which is a staunch friend of New Zealand music. I'm a bit mad at the site at the moment because it is too good, and I ended up buying things. The links from articles to news to reviews to track listings, to track previews to shopping cart to credit card details are so complete and nicely done that you are immediately engrossed. And it keeps a record of your recently viewed pages on the right hand side - magic. It is beautiful. And it can cost you a lot of money ($35 on my first visit). Still on the music angle, on the New Zealand Musician magazine website I found out that a Feelers song is up for an international songwriting award; as an aside in his poem about Bono, excellent commentator El Sid explained why that might be. I got confused by the profusion of text on the front page. There's a LOT of stuff here, and even a LOL of stuff in some of it. Not as exquisitely hyperlinked as Amplifier, but the news is pretty comprehensive, and the search box has "search the mutha" written in it. Crazy.

From music to film - onfilm.co.nz. The first thing that strikes me is that it is quite clearly not. Not Onfilm. It is on the internet. Undaunted by this blatant lie we find out that it is a website based on a magazine - that is also not on film, but on paper. Strike two. But luckily on the next pitch, Onfilm pretty much hits a home run. It's taken me an hour to get back here and write about it because the articles, interviews and info are interesting and informed. The website design, however, is a little clunky - an ironic comment perhaps on Onfilm's begrudging existence onweb. A link from Onfilm's site will take you to the Screen Directors' Guild of New Zealand website, which looks smooth and unthreatening but doesn't have much on it to read. One good interview with NZ director Jonathan King, a conspicuously absent apostrophe, and a lot of trying to get you to be a member or buy their magazine, Take. To be fair, the News page is under development so it might be worth a visit later.

Oh dear - I haven't even surveyed half of my kingdom and already I'm approaching the word limit for this column. I'll complete the tour next time. But for now, just one more site will, in a way, be a sort of closure. Just as the primary colours (from which all other colours can be composed) are red, blue and green, so the basic arts are music, television and comedy. For example, dance is music with comedy added to it, and poetry is television with the comedy removed. So if I just check out a New Zealand comedy website then this column will have a nice rounded feel, I think. Except there isn't really a New Zealand comedy website - as far as I can tell.

There's the website of the Comedy Guild - which aids and advises comedians (they also have a Myspace page), the Classic website - to advertise that fantastic venue - and that's about it. If you look up New Zealand comedy on Wikipedia, you find a link at the bottom to a page called Bovine Free State which, though interesting, is not comedy but a sort of philosophical ranting. So, in addition to having spent $35 on the Amplifier site, I'm now going to have to design, manage, maintain and host a website for Kiwi comedians and fans of comedy as good as Amplifier. There goes any chance of having time to watch the rest of the Heroes series. Stink.