Alexey Smirnov's blog

I used to read WIRED magazine a few years ago. Then when I started working I only had time to read what was absolutely necessary – Communications of ACM.

However, this spring I decided to subscribe to Wired magazine again. I was impressed when I got a copy of the magazine – it has totally changed. To start with, nowadays it is half advertising, half content magazine. I guess this is because of the economic crisis. In other words, it is possible to throw away half of the magazine right off the start.

What remains is also not necessarily interesting. I used to like wired-tired-expired section as well as those new pesky words from the underground that Wired was decyphering to the rest of us. Those sections are gone.

But there are few interesting articles still. In June 2010 issue a number of interesting people are mentioned including Nicholas Carr and Daniel Shirky. I have read books of these authors. The magazine advertises their new books which I definitely need to check out. There is an interesting research article as well called Traffic Cop. It describes brave attempt of few people to build a model of traffic in NYC as a giant spreadsheet. By introducing a number of parameters to the model and adding an ability to fiddle with them it becomes possible to optimize traffic in NYC. This work is so necessary for lots of cities with traffic jams!

To summarize, Wired magazine is always fresh and surprising but not necessarily what you want to read. I can only explain this as an attempt to attract more readers, for example causal technology enthusiasts are more interested in space junk and organ transplants whereas computer specialists are appreciating computer technology content. To me Wired looks more like Popular Mechanics nowadays, at least earlier it was more related to geek culture. On the other hand, the definition of geek is also changing.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 5th, 2010 at 10:44 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.