Shift, a magazine "for living in digital culture", is the second Canadian magazine launched in the United States in 1999. Wedding Bells came first. Shift is part computer hacker, part culture study in terms of its editorial emphasis.

If there's any magazine this year that most captures the spirit of the Internet, it's Shift. Shift approaches digital culture far different than a magazine like Wired, the magazine that offers very specific "how-to" advice. Shift is like the anthropologist studying an unknown tribe. Shift stays somewhat aloof, and that distance gives Shift a position that it can use to make statements on the digital culture.

Shift is at its best when it publishes articles like Clive Thompson's "Am I a Killer", a story from the December issue which sought to answer the question of whether violence in video games translates to an ability to kill in real life. It succeeds when it steps far enough away from its subject matter-often that subject matter is the Internet-to be able to test theories of "cyberflirting" or to look at the evolution of Tiffany Shlain's "Webby Awards."

Aside from choice content, Shift sometimes seems thin. With only 98 pages dedicated to looking at digital culture, the subject matter seems to outweigh the magazine a bit heavily. The December issue, for example, features only 14 different pieces of editorial content.

Thin as it may be, Shift has a unique perspective that's not been matched by any Internet magazine. While there are any number of magazines that can tell you how to log on to a chat room, only Shift will be out there describing the etiquette and recording the birthing pains of our interconnected society.