Did you realize?*
First, some important industry news. It's been eight years since Louis Rossetto's Wired empire was broken up by the company's Class C investors. Conde Nast bought the magazine but Lycos bought Wired Digital. Along with the websites, Lycos also got the valuable URL, wired.com, where Wired News was located, but also, at that time, Wired Magazine's archives. Today, Conde Nast finally got wired.com and Wired News back where they belong, as part of the magazine group.
Link to Wired News story
I suppose I may have played a rather minor role in how this drama unfolded. During the period we developed Wired News in 1996-7, I talked Louis into letting us locate this new, untested product at the wired.com URL. It was a battle, one of many we had, but I (and others) felt that Wired News would be the truest expression of the magazine's vision in the online environment.
A couple years ago, my oldest daughter, Laila, a talented journalist, worked at Wired News for a while. No one there even knew who I was by that point, not that they should have, but it is consistent with my point about the post-modern discontinuities of our current lifestyles, at least here in the Bay Area and other urban centers.
Yesterday, I visited Google for the first time, and had lunch with one of my former students from Stanford. She is so excited to be there, and the entire campus had such an energetic feel, I felt happy she has found such a nice place to work. Google is one of the most fascinating companies to emerge in this new century, but it has a long way to go before it achieves its potential to be a force for good in this confusing new world of ours.
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*Rarely do my 7, 10, and 11-year-olds agree on anything but they all love the Flaming Lips song of this title. The oldest also says it reminds him of J, who introduced the group to them two years ago.
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