Also gone: Kourosh Karimkhany, the VP of corporate development for Wired.com's parent company, CondéNet. (The magazine is run separately by Condé Nast, a sister company to CondéNet.) Karimkhany did the deals to buy Reddit, an online news-discussion site; Ars Technica, a rival tech blog; and Webmonkey, a Web-technology how-to site. With no further deals planned, there wasn't much reason to keep him on, we hear. (Photo by Jackson West)

(Disclosure: Former Valleywag pageview champ Nicholas Carlson now blogs at a higher pay scale for Silicon Alley Insider. Good reblog, Nicholas! Now quit rewriting like you're an NPR foreign correspondent. I work in tech. If I want to meet "the murderous Muthappa Rai," I'll book a junket to visit the call center. (Photo for Wired by Scott Carney, who unlike Carlson actually went to Bangalore.)

Current and Twitter's debate stream was interesting, but not new. Mashable and VentureBeat covered the launch of Sanchez's show three weeks ago, noting that CNN's arrival had forced Twitter's management to exempt Sanchez, like Robert Scoble, from their usual limit on the number of feeds one user could follow.

If you thought Current's lazy stream of debate tweets was hot, watch the above compilation of the always-slighty-overexuberant Sanchez: "My Twitterboard's about to explode." (Video by 23/6)

To: Jason Tanz
Subject: RE: Kaufman draft

Jason, thanks! This is a GREAT start. Just a few questions and reax here. If you don't mind, could you turn this around soonish? Copy desk said they're not going to read another draft-within-a-draft — we need to get them something they can file and be done.

• Great job on the billboard: "Charlie Kaufman's ability to bend moviegoers' minds has made him one of cinema's most respected auteurs. But with his directorial debut, has Hollywood's brainiest screenwriter gotten too smart for his own good?" Don't change a word here. (NOTE TO VW READERS: The billboard or nut paragraph, as it's known in the magazine business, contains the essence of the story, and appears close to the top of the article. Usually after an introductory anecdote that establishes a scene. Finding and memorizing this paragraph lets you talk convincingly about the article at a party. Smart of Tanz to include this in his rough draft, since few will read the next 2,500 words in a browser.)


• "After penning some of the defining movies of recent years ... "
  Unless Kaufman actually writes with a pen instead of a keyboard, let's revisit this metaphor. We wouldn't want readers to imagine Charlie scribbling longhand like Neal Stephenson. Btw, we're still mopping up the ink stains around the office from His Nealness's 114-page quill-on-parchment "clarifications" to our profile of him last month. Jesus, what does Chris see in that guy?


• "Synecdoche, Kaufman's most Kaufmanesque film yet. (Yes, that's a tautology.)"
  Ok, enough with the self-referentialism. You're 700 words in, let's get the plot hopping.


• "Maybe it doesn't end with Kaufman's moment of triumph in Cannes. Maybe after Cannes, Synecdoche sees a limited release. Maybe audiences don't love it. Maybe Kaufman doesn't emerge victorious. Maybe he spends five years pursuing the truest expression of his artistic vision, only to find it misunderstood, or underappreciated, or — worst of all — ignored. Maybe this is a story of frustration and disappointment and failure."
  Maybe let's not run a feature that falls apart at the finish line? Let's try something else: "But were he writing the script, Kaufman would never end with his moment of triumph in Cannes. Instead, the story goes on to the film's limited release. Audiences don't love it. Audiences don't get it. Kaufman's five year struggle to project the truest expression of his artistic vision onto a movie screen turns on him. Kaufman, the director, is forced to explain himself to Kaufman, the audience of one. It's not the closing scene he wrote, but it's the truth he's always sought. The End." Just a suggestion, of course. Feel free to use your own words.

From: Jason Tanz
Date: Sep 4, 2008 10:05 AM
Subject: Hey there from Wired
To: owen@valleywag.com

Hi, Owen. Hope all is well. We met brielfy at Sarah Lacy's book party; at the time I was writing that Julia Allison profile. Perhaps you've heard of it?

Anyhoo, just wanted to clue you in to a little journalistic experiment we're doing. I'm writing a profile of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman for our November issue, and as part of that process, we're blogging everything that goes into the pitching, writing, editing, and design of the story. So we're posting emails and rough drafts and early layouts, etc. etc. We're not quite realtime, but should be caught up by end of next week or so. (The idea is to walk our "radical transparency" talk a little.) Anyway, if you're interested you can check it out at blog.wired.com/storyboard. Our brilliant creative director is also blogging about the design process at http://www.spd.org/the-process/

OK, sorry for the pitch. Hope all's good on your end.

Best,
Jason

The trick was we knew it was going to launch sometime in early September, and we wanted to be out with it as close as possible. That meant the story had to close in late August when it was still a huge secret. Both Steven and I had made considerable promises that it wouldn't leak from us. We pledged that we could be trusted with this information in advance so we could produce a long-form magazine story on a monthly cycle.

Cohn set aside space for the feature under a codename, "Go Lego" — an obvious anagram of "Google," but also a plausible topic for Wired to cover. Files were saved in space used for the September issue, because "no one ever looks back at the old issue," says Cohn. Then, Cohn told staffers the fake story was cancelled. "We told people that we're going to pull that story for ad sales reasons, but we're going to keep it on the map for bureaucratic reasons," says Cohn. Those in on the secret prepared a fake table of contents and even a cover.

"Only 8 or 10 people knew — not because we don't trust people, but because I and Steven had pledged it would be very closely held," says Cohn. (Wired has a staff of 49, according to the masthead.) "Normally the staff sees the entire magazine. I sent out an email this morning letting people know. A lot of people came into my office surprised there was a story they didn't even know about, words on the cover they hadn't read."

Did it ruffle feathers? Perhaps a little, says Cohn: "This morning an editor told me about a story he was working on, and then he said, 'And there's a secret story I can't tell you about.'"

What's telling about this episode? There's more at work here than the standard negotiations for a fly-on-the-wall feature, I think. Google's workers are so fervent in their do-gooder convictions — that their viewpoints are reasonable, that their requests for secrecy are normal, that their cause is fair and just — that they can't help being a bit infectious. Google Chrome has a feature that puts the browser in an ultraprivate mode. Here's the question: Can Googlers ever turn off their own secrecy switch?

Set on a planet called Arbe (pronounced "arb"), Anathem documents a civilization split between two cultures: an indulgent Saecular general population (hooked on casinos, shopping in megastores, trashing the environment—sound familiar?) and the super-educated cohort known as the avaunt, or "auts,"

• 1. The planet's name is spelled Arbre.
• 2. They're the avout, not avaunt. It comes from the Latin a- + vovere, to vow. The avout are, literally, those who've vowed to follow the fictional Cartasian discipline.
• 3. No, no, no, an aut in the book is a rite performed by the avout. Why am I huffy about this? Because Stephenson provides a 20-page glossary at the back of the book.

Their society—the "mathic" world—is clustered in walled-off areas known as concents built around giant clocks designed to last for centuries.

• 4. Earth already has a 622 year old clock that still runs in the cathedral at Salisbury, England. The science-fiction clocks on planet Arbre are designed to last for millennia, like Danny Hillis's planned 10,000 Year Clock. Many of the clocks in Anathem are several thousand years old.

[Stephenson's] early books, a satire about big universities and an eco-thriller, were well received but not huge sellers. In search of big sales and big bucks, he collaborated with an uncle on a couple of political potboilers. "We heard that Tom Clancy had made something like $17 million the previous year and thought if we could snag 1 percent of that, we'd still be OK." They didn't come close, and in 1991, Stephenson says, his career "was moving along at low rpms." Then he wrote Snow Crash ...

• 5. Those political thrillers, Interface and The Cobweb, postdate Snow Crash by several years — 1992, 1994 and 1996, respectively.

But hey, nobody's perfect. Anathem itself has at least one glaring mistake: Midway through, the main character describes a group of people as being treated like "movie stars." As Stephenson's previous 491 pages have made abundantly clear, the word "movie" can't possibly be in the narrator's vocabulary — on planet Arbre, they'd be speely stars. Take that, correctards!

Specifically, NewTeeVee's Janko Roettgers recommended Indian proxy servers that all proved to be either dead or "transparent," meaning they pass your IP address along to YouTube's servers, making you easy to block. He lists a bunch of sites where he guessed video "should pop up." He guessed wrong.

SAI's Eric Krangel didn't even bother listing proxies. He just tells you to "use a proxy server through a country on YouTube's whitelist like South Korea." He also lists a few non-English streaming sites that have zero Olympics footage. Eric, next time try it yourself before you send your readers on a goose chase.

In addition, each of these writers also list a bunch of streaming sites like Veetle and pirate networks that, having been there, we can tell you are packed with nothing but NBC bootlegs. [Clarification: These clips are pre-game coverage from broadcast TV, not from nbcolympics.com, which hasn't started posting yet.]

Wired's wiki page is a shotgun blast of every possible link anyone could think of, including stale tips on watching the BBC from 2005. Like others, it sends the readers hustling to try out links that the authors clearly didn't test first. I tried every single one of the downloadable players listed there. China's Olympics channel, CCTV-5, has been removed from all.

If you want to watch soccer instead of reliving a MetaFilter thread from three years ago, the only actual end-run we've found is this live CCTV-5 stream that lets you watch in silence at 291 Kbps.

We're still looking for an end-run around for YouTube. Send us a working hack and you'll be our hero of the week. But if all you've got is a few guesses you haven't tried, send them to the reporters listed above — they clearly love that stuff.

Hansen shows that Wired is reprising all of its mistakes from the last bubble. "Our vision is to not just be a magazine publisher covering technology, but to be a developer of these things," he says. Of a photo-gallery tool for the website, he says: "We’re hoping to have something to show that will blow people’s minds." Has he been eating Wired founder Louis Rossetto's chocolate?

If I sound like a grumpy old fellow who's seen this all before, it's because I have, first-hand. The sports venture isn't the only repetitive pattern I've spotted. In 1996, Wired bought Suck.com, giving the cultural-critique website enough of a budget to hire unskilled 24-year-olds as copy boys. In 2006, Wired bought Reddit, which lets anyone build their own version of Suck.com (except not as good, because none of Reddit's users are as funny as Joey Anuff, Carl Steadman, or Ana Marie Cox).

What's different now? Oh, sure, we can talk about Internet adoption, broadband, open-source software. Whatever. What has really changed is that now, instead of public shareholders funding Wired's wild experiments, advertisers are willing to foot the bill.

And that is perhaps the biggest reason for Hansen's newfound enthusiasm. He's looking forward to putting ads for sugary electrolyte drinks on his new sports blog. Which only makes us think of OK Soda.

Getting on the cover was nice and all, sure, but what Julia really wants is to write:

Actually, the true goal was never “fame” at all. I wanted two things: 1) editors to publish my work, 2) people to read my work.

Fantastic idea, except for this: Can you recall a single piece of writing by Allison? No matter. Anderson can just hook up a competent reporter already in the Wired stable — we like Fred Vogelstein a lot — and have him write the articles for Allison. Slap her attention-getting byline on them, and done!

Or better yet, why not go with Allison's Plan B? At the end of her email to Anderson, she sighs that she could always go into marketing if the writing thing doesn't work out. Perfect. Chris, can you talk to the folks over on the business side and get Julia a job in Wired's marketing department? She already sounds like she's on it.

The story had been in the works for three or four months, said Cohn, long before Julia caught Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson's attention with a marshmallow lollypop. "All the more reason she's eager to be photographed with him!" Cohn explains. "She was very good at her courtship, but we were already interested in using her as a case study for self-promotion."

There you have it: Both parties can feel they've smartly played the other. Wired can sit pretty with the increased Web traffic, and Julia gets the pony she always dreamed of: a national magazine cover! Her starter startup NonSociety.com, the ostensible news peg here, has nothing to do with it. Julia's blog business is a fig leaf for her most reliable product release: Julia Allison.

The new availability of huge amounts of data, along with the statistical tools to crunch these numbers, offers a whole new way of understanding the world. Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all. There's no reason to cling to our old ways. It's time to ask: What can science learn from Google?

The problem here is that if we stop asking the question "why?" then we are basically making for the foundations of faith. You can always make statistics say nearly anything you want, it simply depends on the assumptions you make when you analyze and present them. While Google's search algorithms are the best currently available, they are not infallible — if they were, then Google wouldn't have the advertising business that Anderson speaks so highly of, as people would find what they were looking for in the natural results.

It's a typical technocratic argument that privileges the rough trade in applied science over the pansy practice of theory. Applied science can be commercialized, and therefore profitable — pure, theoretical science much less so. The thinking goes that markets, those ruthlessly efficient arbiters of quantifiable value, don't need a priori hypotheses to make their judgments, so let's leave the thinking to machinations of mathematics and simply guess at the intent of the black box.

But by implying that you can simple toss aside causation is specious sophistry. Because when you stop asking "why" and only ask "what" and "how much" you're bound to lose a grip on strict rationality. As Schroedinger clearly demonstrated, the very act of measuring can affect the outcome of the measurement. Anderson should be careful what he wishes for — by putting faith in the invisible hand without modeling possible outcomes, we will get what the algorithm calculates we deserve, whether we like it or not. (Photo by Dave O)

When Wired cofounder Louis Rossetto ran the magazine and HotWired in the 1990s — a period, I should disclose, which includes my employment there — he never stopped talking about the company's seemingly limitless future. His pitch, tinged with equal parts Barnum and McLuhan, always boiled down to this: "Get Wired." I chided Hansen for being too low-key about Wired's online successes, and its new ventures, like the TBD HotWired. Rossetto saw no conflict between being a journalist and a marketer. He believed that while Wired reported on the digital revolution, HotWired would live it. He would never have described a product as "TBD." He would have gone with "TBA" instead: to be amazing.

HotWired FAQ

What Is HotWired?
HotWired is new thinking for a new medium. We call it a cyberstation, a suite of vertical content streams about the Digital Revolution and the Second Renaissance with an integrated community space. While HotWired is currently bound by technological limitations that restrict bandwidth, it represents the genetic blueprint that will evolve into the overarching media environment of the next century.

At the core of HotWired's editorial is point of view. We are not in the content business, we are in the context business. People today don't have the time or inclination to make sense of the data flood. HotWired is Wired's answer to the need for professionalism in a new medium that has been filled until now with something that resembles public access television programming.

HotWired is live, twitching, the real-time nervous system of the planet.

What Does HotWired Look Like?
HotWired is a stunning reinterpretation of the World Wide Web. Developed by Creative Director Barbara Kuhr of the award-winning design firm Plunkett + Kuhr, HotWired's look is clean and bright, filled with playful logos by Dutch designer Max Kisman and bursting with world-beat colors.

HotWired can be accessed on the Internet via the World Wide Web and a client application such as Mosaic or NetScape (though be warned, NCSA Mosaic for Windows has a bug which makes it unusable).

How Is HotWired Different?
HotWired doesn't look like any online service out there - it zigs where all the others zag. (HotWired's unofficial design watchword was "war on bevelled edges.") Its content and perspective are as innovative as those of its mothership, Wired magazine, while at the same time being utterly different. Its community space is technologically unrivalled - the first graphical conferencing system for the World Wide Web.

Isn't Advertising Anathema on the Net? The Net community does indeed react negatively to invasive advertising - the kind of spamming conducted recently by the Arizona lawyers Canter and Siegel, which elicited a massive rejection by the Net's immune system. The advertising on HotWired is the opposite of invasive.

Each advertiser is accessible only through a single discreet banner at the head of a content section. Most advertising is 90 percent persuasion and 10 percent information; advertising on HotWired reverses this ratio. And the privacy of members is guaranteed by HotWired's unqualified commitment to never divulge a member's personal information to advertisers.

Why HotWired, Why Now?
Because while Big Media and the telecom behemoths have been busy forming "strategic alliances" to build the "information superhighway" and sending out press releases about the tests they're launching any day now, thousands of companies and millions of people have quietly built a new interactive medium called the Internet.

This medium is not magazines with buttons, any more than television was radio with pictures. It's a new medium with a new aesthetic, a new commercial dynamic.

Many media companies shovel their leftovers into the online world and call it content. HotWired is not one of them.

Where Wired is a clear signpost to the next level, HotWired is operating from that next level. HotWired is a constantly evolving experiment in virtual community. It's Way New Journalism. It's Rational Geographic.

Today is like 1948; a new medium has reached critical mass. We're trying to help define the future of that medium before it ends up like television.

So if you're looking for the soul of our new medium in wild metamorphosis, our advice is simple. Get HotWired.

What Does HotWired Cost?
HotWired is free to members. HotWired's revenue model is similar to broadcast media - content supported by sponsors. HotWired's sponsors are some of the bluest chip advertisers in America, including IBM, AT&T, Volvo, Sprint, MCI, Zima (Coors), Internet Shopping Network (Home Shopping Network), Club Med, etc.

What Hotwired Is Not HotWired is not Wired magazine with another name (Wired works perfectly well in print, thank you). It's not a so-called online magazine (print content reduced to ASCII and shoveled into another medium, narrowband interactive). It's not video-on-demand (a pie-in-the-sky marketing concept created by out-of-touch old-media executives to justify their headlong rush into a new medium they don't understand, broadband interactive). It's not an online service like Prodigy or AOL (now rendered obsolete by the explosion of interest in the Internet and the development of the Web and graphical browsers).

And like Wired before it, HotWired is not a cold, marketing concept, but the heartfelt expression of the passion of its creators.

When was the last time computer science got wrapped up with sadomasochism, murder, blood stains and the KGB.

I betcha the kinky cross-dresser did it! Because as we all know, transvestites are evil and millionaire software developers who shop for foreign brides are what makes America strong. Never mind the jury trial.

• On former White House spokesmonkey Scott McClellan's new book, which won't be back in physical stock until June 9 but is still available on the Kindle for $9.99: "One of the great things about electronic books — they don't go out of stock."
• Regarding reading on a laptop, Bezos asserted, "You certainly can't curl up in bed with one." Actually, our laptop has been our most faithful sleeping partner in years.
• Playing up the Kindle's ability to look up definitions on the fly. "I have discovered my vocabulary is not nearly as good as I thought it was ... I was living in a nice fantasy world where my contextual guesses were accurate."
• Of the 125,000 titles available as both physical books and Kindle e-books, six percent of the sales go to Kindle. Some, including Bezos, buy both a physical copy and an electronic copy — presumably because a Kindle full of books doesn't telegraph just how smart you are.
• Anderson asked by what factor the number of titles available on Kindle would grow by next year in Bezos estimation. "I wouldn't be happy with 20 million. I'm hard to make happy. Bwahahahaha!" (Bezos' laugh is surprisingly deep and loud for such a small man).
• Like Amazon's offering of used copies alongside new copies, it didn't change the amount of original sales, only expanded, suggesting it's not a zero-sum game. "Most people bought as many books as they previously bought, and plus they buy Kindle books."
• Explaining Amazon's strategy of only offering print-on-demand titles printed through BookSurge in its shipping discounts, he said it's because it's cheaper to pack multiple purchases in one box — hence POD books must be printed at Amazon fulfillment centers to qualify.
• Early in the discussion with Bezos, Anderson kept turning the conversation towards his"long tail" theory. Eventually, Bezos caught on, expounding on how Amazon's whole business model was based on niche content availability being a differentiator — shrewdly buttering up Anderson while subtly claiming credit for the idea.

Not especially. In 1996, Wired's online arm, HotWired, had launched a search engine, HotBot, using technology from Inktomi, now part of Yahoo. In the spring of 1997, I briefly worked as a freelancer copyediting marketing materials in which HotWired pitched advertisers on buying keyword advertising. Had Wired managed to go public in 1996, as it hoped, instead of being sold off in pieces to Condé Nast and Lycos, might it have raised enough money to build HotBot out? Possibly. Google didn't launch until 1998, after all.

But it's an academic point. Few of Google's ideas were wholly original; timing, execution, and clarity of vision played greater parts in its success. Not to mention luck. Wired always had more of that in chronicling the digital revolution than in living it.

(Photos by Nicholas Carlson)

He's Back!
Webmonkey was the original Web-developer's resource. now it's reborn as the go-to destination for programmers of all levels. Flex your skills at Webmonkey.com.

We've been known creative tagging for comedic purposes ourselves, but in this case, doth Wired protest too much? Perhaps so. Asked if "ButtMunch" was Wired's internal nickname fro Arrington's site, business editor Dylan Tweney said, "I don't think it has come into general usage around the Wired.com office. We can always hope, though."

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.

Click to expand the image.

1. A pull-down menu replaces the old navigtional bar.
2. There's more space between each submissions
3. Reddit added new momentum arrows to indicate if a story is rising or falling in popularity.
4. Users can now sort by "controversy." "A link can have 0 points but 100 up and 100 down votes," and that, a Reddit engineer told Csutoras, is "something that definitely merits some attention."

The whole contrast-with-Google angle makes no sense, holds up to no scrutiny, and serves no purpose other than to reach the punchy conclusion that Apple is "irredeemably evil." By Kahney's logic, any company that is different from Google —- and clearly most companies are far more different from Google than Apple is —- is evil.

It's a dull knife. Gruber's argument, not Kahney's, founders on its specifics. When Kahney calls Jobs a "notorious micromanager," Gruber retorts that Google VP Marissa Mayer approves every minor change to the Google homepage. There's no comparison: Jobs is a screaming jerk who wouldn't last one minute in the cuddly Googleplex. Gruber's real argument, I suspect, is that he should be writing cover stories for Wired. John, why don't you just pitch Chris Anderson directly? That seems easier.

(Photo by Randy Stewart)

And today, if Google hasn't made itself a Greenleaf-esque slave to its employees, it's at least a cruise director:

Kahney goes on:

The Mountain View campus is famous for its perks, including in-house masseuses, roller-hockey games, and a cafeteria where employees gobble gourmet vittles for free. What's more, Google's engineers have unprecedented autonomy; they choose which projects they work on and whom they work with. And they are encouraged to allot 20 percent of their work week to pursuing their own software ideas. The result? Products like Gmail and Google News, which began as personal endeavors.

Leander Kahney: It's not nice to shout at people. It makes people gun-shy and miserable. Management by fear alienates good workers. Only certain personality types can withstand it. It's better to motivate with carrots than sticks.

Fake Steve Jobs: Leander, you are a hopeless pussy. This kind of attitude is why you're a hack at Wired and not running your own multi-billion-dollar company. Carrots, not sticks? You must be joking.

The mag was indeed free (but not at newsstands). There have been some scattered reports of people walking out with them without paying. After the alarms went off, we hope they were advised about the web offer ;-)