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 ;-)

• The bait: Your desire for real, live sex.
  
• The switch: Porn, so you can fap to your monitor.
  
• The business model: An article headlined "Real sex tantalizes" turns out to be about new and improved porn, and carries an ad for a 65" plasma screen.

• (Photo of local escort ENVY — who you can actually meet for real, not on your Dell — from ClubSYN)

Staff Box: Started by Rossetto and Metcalfe, Wired opened with unknowns. Names now recognized: Rheingold, Sterling, Brand, Markoff, Wolff, Negroponte and McLuhan. Tired / Wired: Front of the book. Nintendo tired, painting wired, and REM tired. Jurassic Park. Review of a print zine called bOING bOING. Features: Paglia about McLuhan. A virtual war story. Cellphone hacking. Free software story doesn't include the phrase "open source." Ads: Unintelligible then as now. Design: Comparable to once-edgy Pat Benatar videos. The Negroponte Index: Negroponte: "High-definition television is clearly irrelevant." Colophon: The means of production. Apple Macintosh II, HP Scanjet IIc, Quark XPress, Farallon, Dinosaur Jr., Curve, k.d. lang, caffeine, sugar, Advil.

• In the fall of 2006, in Apple's boardroom, the prototype flat-out didn't work. The phone dropped calls constantly. Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, "We don't have a product yet." The effect was even more terrifying than one of Jobs' trademark tantrums.
• For those working on the iPhone, the next three months would be the most stressful of their careers. A product manager slammed the door to her office so hard that the handle bent and locked her in; it took colleagues more than an hour and some well-placed whacks with an aluminum bat to free her.
• Just weeks before Macworld, Jobs had a prototype to show wireless boss Stan Sigman. Sigman, uncharacteristically effusive, called the iPhone "the best device I have ever seen."
• About 40 percent of iPhone buyers are new to AT&T's rolls, and the iPhone has tripled the carrier's volume of data traffic in cities like New York and San Francisco.
• In February 2005, in a midtown Manhattan hotel, Jobs laid out his plans before a handful of Cingular senior execs, including Sigman. Apple was prepared to consider an exclusive arrangement to get that deal done. But Apple was also prepared to buy wireless minutes wholesale and become a de facto carrier itself.
• At one point, Jobs met with some executives from Verizon, who promptly turned him down.
• Around Thanksgiving of 2005, eight months before a final agreement was signed, he instructed his engineers to work full-speed on the project. One insider estimates that Apple spent roughly $150 million building the iPhone.
• Internally, the project was known as P2, short for Purple 2.
• Whenever Apple executives traveled to Cingular, they registered as employees of Infineon, the company Apple was using to make the phone's transmitter.
• Even the iPhone's hardware and software teams were kept apart: Hardware engineers worked on circuitry that was loaded with fake software, while software engineers worked off circuit boards sitting in wooden boxes.
• By January 2007, when Jobs announced the iPhone at Macworld, only 30 or so of the most senior people on the project had seen it.

• The Web's top 10 top 10 lists
• 10. Wired's "The 10 Best Gadget Ads of 2007" makes our list because it points out why everyone wants an iPhone. Apple's genius ads.
  
  
• 9.The New York Times' "Buzzwords 2007" can has number 9.
  
• 8. eMarketer's Predictions for 2008 makes our list because we're so handy with their charts.
  
• 
  
• 7. Tumblr founder David Karp's 2008 Tech Predictions.

  Google will launch the Web Service competitors GStorage, GCompute, and GAmazonFlexiblePaymentService.

  
  
• 6.Your Best Shot 2007 Samplr, collected by Flickr, features the most interestingness of any list in our top ten.
  
• 5.Silicon Alley VC blogger Fred Wilson sure can pick 'em. No, not startups. Rock bands. Like the ones in his Top Ten Records 2007.
  
  
• 4.The second Wired entry — out of nearly a dozen folks, so there's real competition here! — to make our list has to be The Top 10 New Organisms of 2007 because it reviews how we did playing God last year.

  Cancer-fighting Clostridium bacteria Surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatment mean that a cancer diagnosis is no longer always a death sentence. But certain oxygen-starved parts of tumors are still difficult to reach with the old methods. Enter the Clostridium family of bacteria. Injected into the body, they grow and multiply only in the oxygen-poor parts of cancer tumors. In September, scientists in the Netherlands showed they could arm Clostridium bacteria with therapeutic protein genes, essentially creating search-and-destroy tumor missiles.

  
  
• 3.We're not going to pretend we understand the Large Hadron Collider, which comes online in 2008, according to Ars Technica'spredictions for 2008. "The Higgs boson, supersymmetric particles, and dark matter candidates all beckon," Chris Lee writes. We'll just show you this neat video.

  
  

• 
  
• 2.Tech CEOs say the darndest things, don't they? Like remember when Zuck said media changes every 100 years? Wired's editors do, and they bring it all back in their 2007 Foot-in-Mouth Awards.

  There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60 percent or 70 percent or 80 percent of them than I would to have 2 percent or 3 percent, which is what Apple might get. — Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on the iPhone, which is outselling all Windows Mobile phones combined.

  
  
  
• 
  
• 1. How's this for meta? We're going to declare Valleywag's own "The Web's top 10 top 10 lists" the winner. Meta FTW!

(Photo by andrer69)