Dear Friends of the Turtle!

The Turtle is new and improved! Why not go to http://fly.to/the-turtle and see the site of revolution as praxis?

The Turtle has been in hibernation for two months, but is now defrosted and ready to face the trials of a new year. While in metabolic stasis, the Turtle pondered, and has resolved to enhance its rhetoric by gratuitously tagging the adjective 'New' onto everthing, in order to sound exciting and urgent. This month's missive is therefore dedicated to the Six New Features of the New People's Turtle:

The Reviews of the Turtle have been launched into the world, to open up our Cultural Front. We start with some impressive literary criticism from New Turtle Writer Jonathan Wilson on David Copperfield, and have posted a string of book reviews, so you can see what one of the editors was reading over Christmas. But these are only the first pebbles of what will become a mighty cairn, and to make this section a success we need your cultural scribblings and multimedia reviews: send us your thoughts on recent books, films, television programmes, plays, poetry and fiction, music, et cetera...

The Dictionary of the Turtle continues to swell proudly. We now have over one hundred definitions posted on the site, with entries for every letter of the alphabet, except for XYZ, which can't be too far away. The Turtle's lexicon is rather front-heavy, with fifty entries crammed into A-D, but there are some fine words after E, and we encourage you to investigate. And when you have studied the articles, find some time to write one or two of your own to reflect your own knowledge and interests: the Dictionary's strength lies in its diversity, and it must be the work of many hands.

We now focus the spotlight on writers who wrote for the first ever Paper Turtle, back in 1993. James Thompson has contributed a polemic against the cult of biography in Britain, and we will shortly be posting new articles from Ben Dalby on the off-shore finance industry, from Chris Brooke on the achievement of Perry Anderson, and -- no doubt also -- a page of George Speight's personal finance tips to help you manage your money.

4. NEW MEDALS

The Stakhanovite of the Month Award hails the stars of the rank and file, those contributors to the Turtle who not only fulfill but also exceed their quotas in fine style. We encourage the winners of the award to download the picture of the medal, which they can then use as wallpaper on their desktop. Martin O'Neill is our first Stakhanovite of the Month, and you can read his Stakhanovite citation on our new Stakhanovite Page.

5. NEW PROMISES

We have many good things on the horizon. Expect the triumphant launch of "The Turtle Salutes", in which we honour popular hero/ines, past and present, and please send us your nominations. Raj Patel has plans to write the Anti-Giddens, a guide to Tony Gidden's forthcoming Reith lectures on Globalisation; and we hope that the Turtle's continuing ruminations on the present-day fad for a "Third Way" will shortly issue in prose.

6. NEW TECHNOLOGY

The most profound transformation in the Turtle's world of late has been technological, as we have erected a new technological architecture to guide the Turtle through the turbulence of 1999. From the new URL to our forthcoming random quote generator, we're pushing forwards the technological frontiers of cybersocialism. For those with a penchant for the technological, the advances we've made are:

* A NEW SERVER: We now have our own server (safely stored under Raj's bed) which means we can mess around with CGI scripts and not have to worry about capacity limits.

* A NEW URL: No need to type in an unmemorable stream of gibberish. Now, one handy url -- http://fly.to/the-turtle -- flies you directly to the people's site. It also means that when the Turtle next migrates to a new part of cyberspace, you won't need to worry about it.

* NEW CGI scripts: In the not-too-distant future (which of course begins now!), everytime you click on "Home", the Turtle will pick an inspiring slogan from its Adage Archive and insert it seamlessly into a page of HTML. Please send in your favourite Majoritarian maxims (which have nothing to do with John Major), and we'll invest them in the Turtle's memory banks for the benefit of all.

* MORE JAVASCRIPT: The buttons at the bottom of the page have disappeared. Instead there's a new phalanx of options on the new sidebar, which glow with pleasure when you run your mouse over them and transport you to the various Parts of the Turtle.

* NEW BACKSTAGE TOYS: The Turtle is has grown from strength to strength, and is now a monstrous 2.5 MB beast with over 500 separate code elements. We've got some new site management software, new computers, and other bits and pieces to bring the whole thing together with much less fuss.

BUT WE END, AS ALWAYS, WITH THE USUAL PLEA!

The Turtle depends on the goodwill of you, the reader. Our Didactic Pleasure Monster feeds on a regular diet of articles, dictionary entries, reviews, jokes and wit. After two months living off it's own bodily fluids, the People's Turtle is hungrier than ever. Do think about sending us something, even if it's only a couple of lines about your favourite word for the Dictionary, or a copy of your favourite slogan for the new front page. For only a genuinely collective endeavour can enable us to collectivise the social world...

Avanti popolo!

The Editors