Riding along on top of the Dot-Com bubble was another bubble, the tech publishing bubble. The explosive growth of the Internet didn't make everything digital, for lots and lots of trees were cut down in order to publish the magazines that chronicled this bubble. Big, fat magazines loaded with ads and articles were arriving weekly or monthly—Red Herring, The Industry Standard, Business 2.0, Fast Company, InfoWorld, Web Techniques, Yahoo! Internet Life. These newcomers joined the old standbys—PC Magazine, PC World, Byte. There were also web sites hungry for content—C Net, ZD Net, BugNet. Even tech writers living in the Outer Rim of the publishing galaxy, like Cleveland, could find plenty of buyers for their work.
But when people think back to this time, I'm sure that one magazine comes to mind first - and that was Wired. It was one of the biggest, and certainly the gaudiest, chroniclers of the "New Way" of doing things. Wired: A Romance by Gary Wolf is an insider's look at the rise, and subsequent selling, of the magazine and the web properties.
The subtitle, A Romance, refers to an idea, "a fantastic idea—the idea that computers will make every existing authority obsolete" and not really to the romance of the couple, Louis Rosetto and Jane Metcalfe, who started and ran the magazine and web properties until they were sold off (the magazine to Condé Nast, the websites to Lycos) in something of a forced sale in 1998.
It is something of a bittersweet romance, if you are looking at making "every existing authority obsolete" or if you think that the Internet is "going to make everything different." For there are still some things that stay the same, in particular the fact that in the end, there has to be more cash coming in to a business than there is cash going out.
Wolf, being in the middle, is able to identify what ultimately brought down Wired, which were the websites. Their losses swamped the profitability of the magazine. In retrospect, that's not surprising, for while I eagerly awaited the magazine each month, I actually spent little time at HotWired or their other sites. The management structure (structure may be too strong a word) run by Rosetto bore some of the responsibility, too. Of course, the magazine still survives, but not nearly what it once was.
The book is a gossipy, insider's account. Sometimes, it is a little disconcerting when Wolf slips from a third person viewpoint to a first person viewpoint, and you sometimes wonder if he's actually in some of the scenes he discusses in the third person. Towards the end, the cast of characters started to get confusing as it grew, especially since Wolf normally gravitated to only using first names. Being a little more clear about the dates may also help, too. But overall, if you are or were a fan of the magazine, (all my back issues are in boxes in my attic or around the office) or want to relive the boom days, the book is an enjoyable read.
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