Valleywag

Posts Tagged “

Wired

”
Nostalgia Trip

Wired to relaunch sports website, 12 years later

At a party thrown by Wired in June, I teased Wired.com editor-in-chief Evan Hansen for eschewing the online publication's mid-1990s bravado in favor of his just-a-journalist aw-shucks routine. I fear the man has taken my jibes seriously, to his employer's peril. He is talking up Wired as a software developer, competing with Google, and thinking about the launch of a sports blog. Remember Adrenaline? Exactly. Neither does Hansen, or anyone else at Wired, the magazine which spawned the ill-fated sports website, which shuttered shortly after Wired Ventures' failed attempt to go public. More »

Feature

10:40 AM on Fri Jul 25 2008
By Owen Thomas
475 views, 4 comments

internet famous

Julia Allison offers to join Wired marketing department

Thanks for the cover, Julia Allison writes to Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson, with the curious caveat: "I would never want your editorial prowess to be called into question over me," and a heavily dropped hint that she's not done with Wired yet. What's her game? More »

12:00 PM on Fri Jul 18 2008
By Melissa Gira Grant
2,139 views, 13 comments

internet famous

Wired rushes Julia Allison cover online -- but who's using whom?

Wired's August cover, featuring Internet nobody Julia Allison, wouldn't normally be going online for another week or so, when the ink-on-dead-trees version hits subscribers' mailboxes. (How pre-postindustrial!) We asked Wired executive editor Bob Cohn why the magazine rushed it online. He told us the posting got pushed up a few days owing to "all the attention online" for the as-yet-unseen cover story — whose subject is how to stir up attention online. More »

12:00 PM on Tue Jul 15 2008
By Melissa Gira Grant
2,648 views, 11 comments

internet famous

Julia Allison's Wired cover -- yes, it's real

We knew you'd ask. So I called Wired executive editor Bob Cohn: He confirmed. August 2008, undeserving Internet fame recipient Julia Allison hits the newsstands, becoming an undeserving print fame recipient. Now the prematurely dysfunctional launch of her blog collective, NonSociety, makes some sense; she rushed the site out to meet Wired's print deadline. How did we not see this coming? Oh, wait: We did.

1:00 PM on Mon Jul 14 2008
By Melissa Gira Grant
7,196 views, 25 comments

google

Wired editor Chris Anderson's latest book proposal would throw scientific method under a bus

Google worship has gone too far. The latest prayer to the pretender to God-like omniscience comes from Wired editor Chris Anderson (and if it drums up enough controversy, it's bound to end in a book deal). He argues that we should give up on the allegedly outmoded maxim that "correlation is not causation," because now we're in the "Petabyte Age" and we can manipulate so much data that we can solve our problems without having to understand them. More »

5:00 PM on Wed Jun 25 2008
By Jackson West
1,773 views, 24 comments

wired

The future isn't even in beta; it's merely "TBD"

At a party Wired threw for its Reddit social news site tonight, to celebrate the release of its software as open source, I pressed Wired News editor Evan Hansen for details on HotWired, the tired Web brand his corporate overseers at Conde Nast are planning to revive. He didn't tell me anything — except that the social network Wired editor Chris Anderson has been talking about is not, in fact, HotWired. Correction appreciated, Evan. HotWired, whatever it is, is far enough along to be part of Wired's PR boilerplate. A press release for Wired property Reddit included this phrase: "HotWired's development is TBD." To be determined. That's the point at which I became bored. More »

12:36 AM on Thu Jun 19 2008
By Owen Thomas
233 views, 1 comment

rumormonger

Wired relaunching HotWired as a social network?

Chris Anderson, Wired's waggle-eared rock-star editor, has been dropping hints left and right about the relaunch of HotWired, a faded Web property Conde Nast picked up along with Webmonkey last month. The rumor we've heard: That Wired is relaunching the site as a news-focused social network like Digg. (Conde Nast already owns Digg competitor Reddit, whose engineers are likely involved in the project.) It's a sensible brand extension for Wired, but a far cry from HotWired's early ambitions, described in a 1994 email as "live, twitching, the real-time nervous system of the planet." Here's the HotWired FAQ, which reads like it was just unearthed from a time capsule: More »

6:00 PM on Mon Jun 16 2008
By Owen Thomas
843 views, 6 comments

crime

Hans Reiser case to be salaciously exploited by "48 Hours Mystery" on CBS

The verdict is in — guilty — but that won't stop television producers from trotting out hoary "clues" to make Hans Reiser's murder of ex-wife Nina Reiser as mysterious as possible on CBS tonight at 10 p.m. Pacific. In the promotional preview clip, Wired's Josh Davis pitches his eventual script: More »

12:00 PM on Tue Jun 3 2008
By Jackson West
724 views, 7 comments

amazon.com

Jeff Bezos pitches the Kindle, BookSurge to skeptical mob at Book Expo America

LOS ANGELES, CA — Jeff Bezos pitched the Kindle to attendees at Book Expo America today in downtown LA, and then sat down with Wired editor and author of The Long Tail Chris Anderson for a little chit-chat. The takeaway? Much like Apple, Bezos uses the euphemism "customer experience" for "vertical integration," especially when it comes to the new Kindle and the requirement that print-on-demand publishers work with Amazon subsidiary BookSurge. After the jump, some choice quotes from before Anderson's questions (presumably from his notes, on regular old paper, pictured here) started to veer into extreme audience irrelevance when he brought up EC2 and Bezos' space ambitions. More »

4:20 PM on Fri May 30 2008
By Jackson West
588 views, 1 comment

history

Wired editor believes magazine could have been Google

Kevin Kelly, Wired's past in-house futurist, has given an interview in which he makes the seemingly ludicrous claim that Wired could have been Google. The New York Observer has a giggle at Kelly's statement that "from the very beginning, Wired believed in 'search.'... I believe that had Wired not been divided and sold that we might have actually arrived at the same place that Google had." But was Kelly really that far off? Watch the whole video and see More »

12:20 PM on Fri May 23 2008
By Owen Thomas
2,210 views, 14 comments

party report

Wired celebrates 15 years of turning a cult into a culture (and back again)

MIDTOWN WEST — "You're a normal person," Wired editor Chris Anderson asked me at Wired's 15th anniversary party last night in New York. "What do you make of all this?" He nodded his head toward the four corners of the roof top, crowded with the Wired set. In response, I said something about the thick-rimmed black frames and all the scarves. But for reading-comprehension points, I should have said I felt like I was in the midst of a cult. Because that's what Conde Nast's Wired is all about, Anderson and Wired cofounder Louis Rossetto told us in their speeches: turning the cult of technology into a culture, but keeping it as fervent as a cult. That and covers of a nude Jenna Fischer and LonelyGirl15 in bed, of course. Below, photos of the faithful. More »

8:40 AM on Tue May 20 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
1,697 views, 5 comments

acquisitions

Wired parent buys Ars Technica -- and Webmonkey, too?

TechCrunch reports that CondeNet, the online arm of Condé Nast and the parent of Wired.com, has bought Ars Technica, a rival technology news site. But if the latest issue of Wired is any indication, that's not the only tech property that's moved to CondeNet recently. On page 24, Wired's June issue announces a new version of Webmonkey, a defunct site for Web developers, under a list of Wired.com features: More »

7:05 PM on Fri May 16 2008
By Owen Thomas
1,528 views, 19 comments

great moments in journalism

Wired has nothing against "ButtMunch" -- excuse me, TechCrunch

Reading the latest in the spat between Wired's Epicenter blog and Michael Arrington over the Washington Post's deal to syndicate TechCrunch articles and the ethical propriety of the TechCrunch editor's investments in startups his blog covers, I noticed that the post was in the category "ButtMunch." The latest post states that "We have nothing against Arrington," but the tag originated last week in a post that accused TechCrunch of pilfering a story angle related to Steve Ballmer's continued tenure at Microsoft in the wake of the Yahoo deal. More »

3:00 PM on Tue May 13 2008
By Jackson West
1,072 views, 8 comments

we read twitter so you don't have to

Michael Arrington doesn't appreciate Wired's abuse of his ethics

Wired on TechCrunch's syndication deal with the Washington Post:
We've got nothing against TechCrunch, but it seems crazy-crazy to us that the Washington Post, a paper known for the sort of reporting that can take down U.S. presidents, is publishing content written by a dude who invests in the companies he writes about.
Which naturally prompted the characteristically vulgar response from Michael Arrington, TechCrunch editor and bastion of indecorous surliness. Portfolio.com quotes Arrington: "Journalism is evolving."

10:00 AM on Fri May 9 2008
By Jackson West
1,896 views, 15 comments

reddit

Leaked screenshots of Wired's redesigned Reddit

Social news aggregator — that is to say, Digg clone — Reddit is working on a redesign. Online media consultant Brent Csutoras landed leaked screenshots. We've annotated them for your convenience. More »

8:00 AM on Thu Apr 24 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
1,040 views, 4 comments

great moments in pr

Press release like it's 1999

"The next big thing in consumer gadgets will be the 'Internet in your pocket,'" according to Intel's announcement reported in the New York Times today. Where did I read that line nine years ago? Oh, right.

7:00 PM on Wed Apr 2 2008
By Paul Boutin
494 views, 6 comments

death of print

Newsweek paid Steven Levy six figures to jump to Wired

Such is the plight of the dying magazine business: Newsweek paid what's rumored to be a high-six-figures ransom not to keep Steven Levy, its star tech writer, but to unburden itself of him just so he could join Wired. The Washington Post-owned weekly is offering editorial staff generous buyouts, up to two years' salaries, to reduce its headcount. Levy smartly leapt at the offer, knowing he could easily get a job elsewhere. Something seems backwards in this labor market: Don't acquirers normally pay a premium for control?

1:40 PM on Fri Mar 21 2008
By Owen Thomas
2,216 views, 8 comments

Levy joining Wired as staff writer An internal memo from Wired executive editor Bob Cohn says Steven Levy, Newsweek's tech reporter for 13 years, is joining the magazine as a staff writer. Cohn says Levy is reporting a book on Google. [Romenesko]

Comment

next »