At first, the thought of a new Smith magazine was smugly appealing. After years of taking a certain amount of kidding about the plainness of my very common married last name (which I simply assumed was jealousy given the ease of spelling, pronunciation, etc.), I was quite pleased to think I would be among a fraternity with our very own publication.

Just us Smiths, I thought. All 3 million of us in America, reading about all of the other fabulous worldwide Smiths. Will Smith. Patti Smith. Maggie Smith. Zadie Smith. Dean Smith. Jaclyn Smith. Anna Nicole Smith. (OK. Maybe that list needs some work.)

Turns out, though, I was being a selfish Smith.

The new Smith magazine, which launched online at www.smithmag.us on Friday and is set to debut a print version later this year, was really created for the everyman, looking to tap into the Smithness in all of us with stories about quirky, everyday life kind of things. Like a story about a food writer and his Mafia family ties. Or a woman who married a mortician.

You see, you don't have to be a Smith to actually get the magazine. You don't have to be a Smith to write for the magazine. You just have to have a Smith-like story or an interest in reading about, well, the Smiths, the Johnsons, the Joneses, the Williamses and everyone else out there in America.

"Everybody has a story, and everybody should have a place to tell that story," said magazine founder Larry Smith.

Smith, who runs Smith with a small staff out of New York, came up with the idea for the magazine several years ago. He hashed out the concept before naming it after himself -- and the rest of the people in the country with the most common last name.

And then he waited until last week to get the word out -- to us 4,500 Smiths in the media.

Why?

Why, he was waiting for National Smith Day, of course.

Started in the 1990s, National Smith Day was designated for Jan. 6 to celebrate the birthday of one of the country's original Smiths, Capt. John Smith, the English colonist who led the Jamestown settlers.

Larry Smith, who has been in the magazine business as an editor and writer for 15 years working for print and electronic magazines such as Men's Journal and Yahoo Internet Life, said that, since launching the online version, he has heard from several people -- mostly Smiths -- who were disappointed the magazine wasn't just for and about Smiths. He even blogged about the responses on the magazine's Web site this week.

"It really does stand for the everyman," he reiterated.

There are some perks at the magazine for being a Smith, though. Smith says if you're a Smith, he'll send you the first issue free. Just let him know you're a Smith.

As for his own Smithness, he's quite happy being in the company of millions of other Smiths.

"As I got old enough, I enjoyed the anonymity of it," he said. "No one really knows what you are. So you can be really what you want to be."

And the name itself? "It's a name you can trust," he said.

He expects to print 100,000 copies of Smith magazine, which will be distributed at bookstores and newsstands.