From a promotional email sent out by Wired Magazine:
For a limited-time, subscribe to WIRED and get the Mystery Issue guaranteed!* Edited by J.J. Abrams, co-creator of Lost and director of the new Star Trek movie, this issue is sure to be like no other.
*while supplies last
Guaranteed? Inconceivable! And speaking of that issue of Wired, be prepared to read a bunch about how it is going to save print media by moving the crossword from the games page into the entire rest of the magazine.
So, as Mr. Bevacqua wrote on his blog, he spent the next several days following the hidden clues he believed he'd found, using Morse code, alternative computer keyboard layouts and even electrician's wiring codes to solve the covert brainteasers. Finally he was directed to a hidden Web site, from which he sent an e-mail message to a secret account. A short while later he learned that he was the first Wired reader to solve an extensive hidden puzzle embedded throughout the magazine.
(thx, lloyd)
Phil Gyford has posted scans of all the covers of Wired UK, a British version of Wired that existed from 1995 to 1997. I stayed at Phil's flat once and marveled at this collection...it's nice to see these online.
Update: Some old Wired Japan covers can be found here and here. (thx, anthony)
Wired is keeping a blog that details the process of writing an upcoming story on, appropriately, writer/director Charlie Kaufman.
An almost-real-time, behind-the-scenes look at the assigning, writing, editing, and designing of a Wired feature. You can see more about the design process on Wired creative director Scott Dadich's SPD blog, The Process. This is a one-time experiment, tied solely to the Charlie Kaufman profile scheduled to run in our November 08 issue.
We will post internal e-mails, audio, video, drafts, memos, and layouts. We reserve the right to edit our posts, out of sympathy for the reader or to protect our relationships with our sources. We will not post emails with sources or reproduce communications that take place outside of Wired.
Reading through, I'm not sure I want to know how the sausage is made. With the well-established processes and tropes that magazines follow in publishing each and ever month, stuff like this has a tendency to come off as cynical and overly mechanical (e.g. the piece is already mostly written...they just need Kaufman to fill in the details). I also keep thinking...what if Kaufman reads this before his interviews take place? Is it better or worse for the finished piece that he knows their whole angle going in? (via snarkmarket)
Update: Clarification from Jason Tanz (the author of the Kaufman piece) at Wired...most of the interviews with Kaufman have already been conducted and a rough draft of the story has been completed. They wanted to be at least this far along before they posted any of these materials so as to avoid complications with the interview process. Tanz says that they hope to be "pretty close to real time [on the storyboard blog] by the end of next week".
Last week, Rex Sorgatz reviewed the 15-year-old first issue of Wired; lo and behold, Wired founding editor Louis Rossetto sent him a lengthy response that's a whole lot more interesting than the original review (sorry, Rex).
This beta was a full-on 120 page prototype, with actual stories re-purposed from other places, actual art, actual ads (someone quipped that it was the ultimate editor's wet dream to be able to pick their own ads), and then all the sections and pacing that was to go into the actual magazine. The cover was lifted from McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage; it was the startling black and white image of a guy's head with a big ear where his eyes should have been. The whole thing got printed and laminated in a copy shop in Berkeley that had just got a new Kodak color copier and rip. Jane, Eugene, and I went in when the shop closed on Friday evening and worked round the clock through the weekend. Took 45 minutes to print out one color page! We emerged Monday morning with the prototype, which we had spiral-bound in a shop in South San Francisco, before we boarded a plane for Amsterdam to present it to Origin's founder and CEO Eckart Wintzen, to see if he would approve the concept, agree to advertise in the magazine, and then give us the advance we crucially needed to keep the project alive.
Wired's cover feature for the March 2007 issue is Snack Culture. "Movies, TV, songs, games. Pop culture now comes packaged like cookies or chips, in bite-size bits for high-speed munching. It's instant entertainment - and boy, is it tasty." Even though kottke.org is a part of this culture, I still prefer a full meal.
Caught the first episode of Wired Science on PBS last night and it wasn't so bad. It's like Wired magazine, but on TV. If you missed it, the entire show is available online.
Conde Nast buys Wired News (and the wired.com domain name), reuniting it with Wired magazine after 8 years apart. Chris Anderson must be beside himself with joy; under the agreement with Lycos, Wired magazine couldn't do much of anything on the web in the past eight years (which, in my mind, hurt their credibility in the eyes of anyone who was interested in online media). (via bb)
Update: Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson on the acquisition. "The result was an agreement between the two, by which Wired News (wired.com) would host our content on their site (under wired.com/wired) next to their own content, but we, the magazine, were prohibited from doing anything in the digital realm. Aside from being somewhat ironic that Wired Magazine wasn't really wired, it was frustrating for us to be unable to walk the talk, since we didn't control the site."
New Yorker review of Chris Anderson's new book, The Long Tail. Oddly, there's no disclaimer that Anderson works for the same company that publishes The New Yorker. Not that the review is all synergistic sunshine; the last half pokes a couple of holes in Anderson's arguments.
The Chicago Tribune has published their list of the 50 best magazines of 2006. Top fiving it for you: The Economist, Dwell, Wired, The New Yorker, and ESPN the Magazine.
Wired Magazine profiles Josh Davis. Davis typically gets too much credit for being controversial and too little for his work. His speeches/appearances are well worth seeking out; they're entertaining, informative, and inspiring.
Steven Levy profiles Tim O'Reilly for Wired. Kind of ironic since O'Reilly Media has put itself in the middle of what's happening on the web, a position that perhaps should have been occupied by Wired, had they not sold all their online properties several years ago.
Long Tail poster boy Amazon's tail isn't as long as first reported. Oops. (But a good oops...Chris is after the truth here, not just a good story.)
WiReD magazine on the Mosaic WWW browser and how it is "well on its way to becoming the world's standard interface". "Mosaic is the celebrated graphical 'browser' that allows users to travel through the world of electronic information using a point-and-click interface. Mosaic's charming appearance encourages users to load their own documents onto the Net, including color photos, sound bites, video clips, and hypertext 'links' to other documents. By following the links -- click, and the linked document appears -- you can travel through the online world along paths of whim and intuition."
