CYBERSCRIBE: Erck and TIME Asia's website

The hottest publication in Asia, I'm pleased to say, is not TIME. It's TIME.com Asia, also known as time.com/asia. You may recognize that latter string of letters from the upper left-hand corner of our cover every week (bet some of you wondered about that). It's the URL, or Universal Resource Locator, for TIME's Asian page on the World Wide Web. Type it into your computer's Web browser, and it will whisk you to a rich and varied electronic realm of breaking news stories, photo essays, travel tips, polls and quizzes--all about Asia. And from there, you can link directly to the electronic versions of TIME's other editions, as well as affiliated Time Inc. magazines (FORTUNE.com, PEOPLE.com, etc.) and CNN--collectively the most frequently visited news and entertainment sites on the Web.

Since TIME.com Asia's debut early this year, traffic on our particular corner of the Web has soared more than 20-fold, making it one of the Internet's fastest-growing sites. The master of this universe is Hong Kong-based reporter Dan Erck. He helped launch the page as a repository for all of TIME's stories about Asia, which are posted online at the beginning of each week (before printed copies are on sale in some places). In recent weeks, he has introduced a number of other features:

Polls. You can now offer your opinion about everything from the economic crisis to your favorite Jackie Chan movie. A recent poll about Malaysia's former Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim drew a stunning 80,000 votes. Results are updated every few seconds. "It's interesting to watch during a crisis," says Dan, "when you can actually see the tide of opinion shifting. Of course, the polls are not scientific, so you have to take the results with a grain of salt."

Quizzes. Each week, we invite you to test your knowledge of current events by answering a few questions based on our news coverage. (Quick: name India's newest passenger car.) Best of all, you can instantly find out how smart you are. (If you said, "Indica," you're very smart indeed.)

Malaysia "supersite." Last week we added a new special report dedicated to one of Asia's Web-savviest countries. Go to time.com/asia/malaysia, and you'll find our recent stories, interviews and polls about Malaysia, all in one convenient place.

Media visionaries say the Web will someday become the primary delivery system for magazines like TIME. Maybe so. For now, we'll continue to supplement TIME.com Asia with the familiar version printed on paper. After all, you can't take your computer into the bathtub. Though Dan's working on that.