I know I should be writing about Microsoft and Yahoo, but I confess that I find the whole thing so mind-numbingly boring that I would be asleep before I made it through another post about two gigantic, boring companies merging into one gigantic, boring company. So I thought I would point instead to a fantastic post by my friend Rex Sorgatz of Fimoculous about Wired magazine in honour of it turning 15 this month.

As I admitted in a comment on Rex’s post, I have a complete collection of Wired magazines from the very first issue all the way up to the mid-1990s, when it got huge and boring (much like Microsoft and Yahoo). My wife gives me grief every time we move, because there are about three boxes full of magazines — and those suckers are heavy. The magazines themselves are somewhat moldy and wrinkled in spots because our basement flooded a few years ago. Eventually I will throw them out, I suppose.

But sometimes it’s fun to flip one open and look at what we were so excited about all those years ago: the 14.4 modems and “virtual reality” and a magazine called bOING bOING (like anyone would read something with a dumb name like that). All the bigs were on the masthead, like Nicholas Negroponte and Kevin Kelly from Whole Earth Magazine — which I confess I also have a few issues of — and the WELL.

Rex is right when he says that the design didn’t really take hold for a couple of years, but it was pretty damn cool even in the first issue. And it had way more meat than Mondo 2000 (which I also have a few issues of). I have another admission: I applied for a job at Wired in 1993, when I was a business writer in Toronto, because I thought it would be so cool to write for them. The first of many rejection letters :-)

Update:

Founding editor Louis Rossetto responded to Rex’s post.

Rex Sorgatz, who works for MSNBC and also writes an eclectic and insightful blog at Fimoculous.com, has launched something at the news site that I think is a great effort at harnessing Digg-style voting power in the context of a news event — and in a much more interesting way than the typical user poll or survey. It’s called iPredict (I’m going to forgive Rex the use of the now-ubiquitous “i” prefix), and it creates a real-time graph of user votes on a particular outcome, such as whether Harry Potter dies in the final book. You can see how many people voted and the history of earlier votes. Very cool. Rex has an overview of the thinking behind iPredict (and a great Marshall McLuhan quote) on his blog.