HotWired Goes Live
Chip Bayers
HotWired is now live on the Net. You're welcome to join us with your
favorite graphical Web browser at:
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.
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.
hotwired-info@hotwired.com%Internet@ilt.columbia.edu
HotWired FAQ
What Is HotWired?
How Is HotWired Different?
Why HotWired, Why Now?
What Does HotWired Cost?
What Hotwired Is Not
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From: hotwir...@hotwired.com (Chip Bayers)
Subject: HotWired Goes Live
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