Last week was geektacular. I was linked to on Slashdot about the GLAT and on Fark about the page on cleaning pennies. This has blown through any previous high number of visits to my site.
At last check, the cleaning pennies page has been hit so much I’ve burned up around 30 Gigs of data transfer. Yikes.
While it is nice to have lots of visitors and read nice comments about the page, the bandwidth management is an issue. Watching the spread of the link from page to page and from the US outward to the rest of the world is interesting.
In other news, the new Wired magazine arrived in the mail today. I was reading it in the bathroom while I watched the girls take a bath tonight. There were so many frickin’ ads it was hard to find the content.
I started ripping out the pages that were ads. I only ripped it out if it was an ad on both sides. I pulled out half the pages… Above you can see the pile of ads on the left and the remaining magazine on the right. Remember there are still a ton of ads inside that have content on one side.
How much would it cost to have an ad-free version of the the magazine?
Yep, I always strip the ads fro my magazines before reading them. Got to be careful with some magazines as stripping the ads also damages the spine” and causes the few good pages to also fall out.
Some categories of ads:
Subscription cards (loose)
Subscription cards (bound)
Perfume ads (bleh)
Multipage card stock ads, bound to magazine with a strip of sticky rubbery gum
Foldout ads on the back side of magazine covers.
Ads made of a different paper than the rest of the magazine, forcing you to turn to them.
Multipage fold out (centerfold type) ads in the middle of the magazine.
Pop up ads
Musical (chip) ads (saw one of these for HBO’s Sopranos once…
CD/DVD ads (got a few of these in Entertainment Weekly…touting the release of television series DVDs.
What is a complete collection of Wired mags (excellent condition with ads intact) worth? History of the internet bubble, telecom hype, netscape IPO, etc…
All the way back to the first issue.
They are taking up too much space.
Anybody want these?
Wow, I gave up my collection of wired years ago, I’ve also moved half a dozen times since wired started publication. I wished you could get little slipcases for each year like national geographic. I also whish I had kept issue number one.
I don’t really mind ads as long as the paper is not different from the rest of the magazine. That also goes for bound subscription cards, I hate those, always in the way of my reading enjoyment.
Actually my favorite part of getting a new magazine is holding the first few pages and letting the rest of the rag “flip” downwards, watching all the unbound subscription cards and whatever else is in there fall to the ground.
Yeah, the WORST offender advertisement these days has to be the super stiff RED AIRLINE CARD ads that are so craptacular (I think they are from Virgin Airlines). I hate them.
They don’t bend with the mag pages so keeping the mag open to the current page of interest is (shall we say) problematic. Its like a pop-up ad on your computer screen — but its physical.
I don’t get that ad campaign at all. Never read the copy. Makes me hate the sponsor (and the mag for accepting it).
just don’t forget us little people who have been reading cruftbox well before your stat counters went berzerk. carry on.
My trash dumpster gladly accepted my unbroken run of Wired magazine. After 5 moves of lugging those boxes around, I had enough.
Trash Dumpster (oh…the horror). Recycle at least.
Surely there is a better “repurposing” of this material.
Nobody has has moved move times than I have dragging around a complete Wired collection (in addition to some other classics…Byte magazine anyone? How about MIPS magazine? Or CGR and CGW?). [ Aside: I go all the way back to the days of Creative Computing magazine. I bet not too many of you remember that one (hint: predates PC World and the like). ]
I’m holding onto the past a little too tightly.
Need to purge.
Help?
It’s not just mags. I’ve got hardware too (Original Mac, Original Amiga, SGI Indigo2Extreme, etc).
Maybe a job for ebay. Problem is these things are heavy and/or do not ship easily (or cheaply) without damage.
Well, there was a time just a few years ago when tech advertising was non-existant. So now, if half of wired is ads, does this not mean the tech sector has had somewhat of a recovery?
It’s a good time to be a geek if a). you’ve got skills and keep getting smarter; b). you’ve got a job. The time to whine is when there are no ads.
Yup. The blue recycle bin was the happy consumer of my Wired mag collection. I too am typically unable to throw things away. Creative Computing was my magazine of choice along with Byte and Nibble. I even have a couple copies of HardCore lurking in my garage, I believe 🙂
You can use spraymount adhesive to glue one-sided ads which face other one-sided ads together.
SOme of our supermarkets provide bins to put loose ad inserts from magazines into before buying them.
I *love* Wired, but this issue seemed a little ad-heavy to me too. Worse, many the ads were cleverly designed to look a lot like normal Wired content, and were more interleaved with the normal content than usual, so there were several I had to stare at a while before I could figure out if they were ads or articles. I think some sort of convergence is going on, so that soon the ads and articles will be indistinguishable from each other. OTOH, it costs me like a dollar an issue, so I’ll cope.
Am I the only one that remembers Suck.com’s infamous How to Read Wired Magazine column from 1995!? Geez, you web youngsters have no sense of history.