Mark Evans

I started to leaf through the latest Wired magazine
last night when it suddenly struck me it was a nice, hefty,
advertising-packed 296 pages. This took me back to the height of the dot-com
boom when magazines such as Wired, Business 2.0 (which went bi-weekly), Fast Company and the Industry Standard
regularly published heavy, back-busting issues. In fact, they were so
big, I got
into this weird habit of ripping as many ads as I could from these
paper monsters to lighten the load - there has got to be a
description for
this kind of behavior, right?. I don't think
the high-tech
magazine industry has totally rebounded back to dot-com health but
it's interesting to see Wired getting thicker. Does this suggest
the
high-industry is becoming more optimistic? Maybe. I guess what's
encouraging
about Wired's return is its advertiser roster is chock-a-block with
blue-chip
firms such as Toyota, Sun, Acura, Motorola, Sony and Microsoft.
There is a comforting absence of all those hot Web 2.0 start-ups. When
you see these guys start advertising in Wired, sell everything because
the party is probably over. One thing about Wired is it seems have
recaptured its “cool” factor. There was a time not so long ago
when Wired lost me as a reader. Perhaps it was simply information
overload given I read a lot - much of it not on paper - or it
could have been Wired lost its focus trying to figure out whether
it wanted to be a tech magazine or a business magazine or both or
neither. In any event, I got lured back to Wired by a ultra-low
subscription offer (those $2 a month deals that used to be mysteriously
unavailable to Canadians) so I'm back in the fold. For me, the
high-tech magazine comeback will really be complete when freelance
writing
assignments start to materialize again. During the boom, editors were
wonderfully desperate for content because they needed something to fill
those
annoying gaps between advertisements!