Hansen shows that Wired is reprising all of its mistakes from the last bubble. "Our vision is to not just be a magazine publisher covering technology, but to be a developer of these things," he says. Of a photo-gallery tool for the website, he says: "We’re hoping to have something to show that will blow people’s minds." Has he been eating Wired founder Louis Rossetto's chocolate?

If I sound like a grumpy old fellow who's seen this all before, it's because I have, first-hand. The sports venture isn't the only repetitive pattern I've spotted. In 1996, Wired bought Suck.com, giving the cultural-critique website enough of a budget to hire unskilled 24-year-olds as copy boys. In 2006, Wired bought Reddit, which lets anyone build their own version of Suck.com (except not as good, because none of Reddit's users are as funny as Joey Anuff, Carl Steadman, or Ana Marie Cox).

What's different now? Oh, sure, we can talk about Internet adoption, broadband, open-source software. Whatever. What has really changed is that now, instead of public shareholders funding Wired's wild experiments, advertisers are willing to foot the bill.

And that is perhaps the biggest reason for Hansen's newfound enthusiasm. He's looking forward to putting ads for sugary electrolyte drinks on his new sports blog. Which only makes us think of OK Soda.

When Wired cofounder Louis Rossetto ran the magazine and HotWired in the 1990s — a period, I should disclose, which includes my employment there — he never stopped talking about the company's seemingly limitless future. His pitch, tinged with equal parts Barnum and McLuhan, always boiled down to this: "Get Wired." I chided Hansen for being too low-key about Wired's online successes, and its new ventures, like the TBD HotWired. Rossetto saw no conflict between being a journalist and a marketer. He believed that while Wired reported on the digital revolution, HotWired would live it. He would never have described a product as "TBD." He would have gone with "TBA" instead: to be amazing.

HotWired FAQ

What Is HotWired?
HotWired is new thinking for a new medium. We call it a cyberstation, a suite of vertical content streams about the Digital Revolution and the Second Renaissance with an integrated community space. While HotWired is currently bound by technological limitations that restrict bandwidth, it represents the genetic blueprint that will evolve into the overarching media environment of the next century.

At the core of HotWired's editorial is point of view. We are not in the content business, we are in the context business. People today don't have the time or inclination to make sense of the data flood. HotWired is Wired's answer to the need for professionalism in a new medium that has been filled until now with something that resembles public access television programming.

HotWired is live, twitching, the real-time nervous system of the planet.

What Does HotWired Look Like?
HotWired is a stunning reinterpretation of the World Wide Web. Developed by Creative Director Barbara Kuhr of the award-winning design firm Plunkett + Kuhr, HotWired's look is clean and bright, filled with playful logos by Dutch designer Max Kisman and bursting with world-beat colors.

HotWired can be accessed on the Internet via the World Wide Web and a client application such as Mosaic or NetScape (though be warned, NCSA Mosaic for Windows has a bug which makes it unusable).

How Is HotWired Different?
HotWired doesn't look like any online service out there - it zigs where all the others zag. (HotWired's unofficial design watchword was "war on bevelled edges.") Its content and perspective are as innovative as those of its mothership, Wired magazine, while at the same time being utterly different. Its community space is technologically unrivalled - the first graphical conferencing system for the World Wide Web.

Isn't Advertising Anathema on the Net? The Net community does indeed react negatively to invasive advertising - the kind of spamming conducted recently by the Arizona lawyers Canter and Siegel, which elicited a massive rejection by the Net's immune system. The advertising on HotWired is the opposite of invasive.

Each advertiser is accessible only through a single discreet banner at the head of a content section. Most advertising is 90 percent persuasion and 10 percent information; advertising on HotWired reverses this ratio. And the privacy of members is guaranteed by HotWired's unqualified commitment to never divulge a member's personal information to advertisers.

Why HotWired, Why Now?
Because while Big Media and the telecom behemoths have been busy forming "strategic alliances" to build the "information superhighway" and sending out press releases about the tests they're launching any day now, thousands of companies and millions of people have quietly built a new interactive medium called the Internet.

This medium is not magazines with buttons, any more than television was radio with pictures. It's a new medium with a new aesthetic, a new commercial dynamic.

Many media companies shovel their leftovers into the online world and call it content. HotWired is not one of them.

Where Wired is a clear signpost to the next level, HotWired is operating from that next level. HotWired is a constantly evolving experiment in virtual community. It's Way New Journalism. It's Rational Geographic.

Today is like 1948; a new medium has reached critical mass. We're trying to help define the future of that medium before it ends up like television.

So if you're looking for the soul of our new medium in wild metamorphosis, our advice is simple. Get HotWired.

What Does HotWired Cost?
HotWired is free to members. HotWired's revenue model is similar to broadcast media - content supported by sponsors. HotWired's sponsors are some of the bluest chip advertisers in America, including IBM, AT&T, Volvo, Sprint, MCI, Zima (Coors), Internet Shopping Network (Home Shopping Network), Club Med, etc.

What Hotwired Is Not HotWired is not Wired magazine with another name (Wired works perfectly well in print, thank you). It's not a so-called online magazine (print content reduced to ASCII and shoveled into another medium, narrowband interactive). It's not video-on-demand (a pie-in-the-sky marketing concept created by out-of-touch old-media executives to justify their headlong rush into a new medium they don't understand, broadband interactive). It's not an online service like Prodigy or AOL (now rendered obsolete by the explosion of interest in the Internet and the development of the Web and graphical browsers).

And like Wired before it, HotWired is not a cold, marketing concept, but the heartfelt expression of the passion of its creators.

He's Back!
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