Our fourth, this issue comes with an exclusive, extensive interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt by David Rowan, a big investigation into Rupert Murdoch’s plans for charge online by James Silver, a splendid piece by Andrew Brown on making the “Perfect Baby”, not to mention the regular genius of Russell Davies and Warren Ellis.

There are also pirates, guitar pedals, vats of lab-grown meat, and some deeply sexy graphics action from Jer Thorp. We’re very proud. You should buy it…

Actually, we’ve been doing very well. Anecdotally, we’ve been selling out at quite a few of our stockists. But that, right there, is the problem: for someone like me, with a background in reader statistics-heavy online media, it’s been frustrating how little we know about our readers. While a website can tell who its readers are, where they come from, when they get there, how long they spend where, and where they go to when they leave, all within milliseconds, all a magazine knows is how many it sold – and not necessarily down to the individual shop – and all within a few months of the magazine first going on sale. That’s it.

This has three immediate effects. Firstly, the demographics that magazines cater too are nothing more than educated guesses. Whether this is a good idea or not is another post, really: I’m not at all convinced that it’s a bad idea to have to invent your reader rather than chase real peoples’ opinions into a spiral. (I’m not going to comment on what this means to the advertising industry: they know all this already.)

But second, we can’t properly optimise the distribution. All magazines sell out in some places and don’t sell at all in others – that’s understandable – but currently there’s nothing whatsoever that a publisher can do about it in anything close to real-time. We might look at maps of sales across the country and change the number of copies sent to different shops, but this happens with a lag of, again, months. Even the most efficiently distributed magazine still pulps thousand of copies every month after they were left unsold somewhere – even when the same magazine leaves readers disappointed because it was sold out in their local newsagent.

Both of these points bring me to my first point, which is this. Sometimes in an assailed content business, it’s not the content that’s breaking: it might be the business bit. Reinventing the content at the same time isn’t necessarily the right thing to do: but you’ll never know this unless you actually get into the business itself. Being a consumer isn’t good enough. I’ll be talking about this more, I think, but not today.

Anyway, the third upshot of this sort of thing is that it does start to present opportunities, once you manage to get the data. And get some data I did. I managed to get a spreadsheet of our stockists, and have made a prototype webapp thing for the iPhone3 to show you the places to buy Wired UK nearest to your current location. It won’t tell you if they have any left in stock, but it will tell you who, at least, had some in the first place.

To try out this beta application, point your iPhone (upgraded to version 3) at:

benhammersley.com/whereswired

It’s very rough, and slow, and the data isn’t complete – it’s missing quite a few shops at the moment – but the basic idea is there. email me if you’ve got any feedback – it’d be greatly appreciated.

Hereafter the technical bits.

The address data came in an Excel spreadsheet, which I exported as CSV. I then wrote some Perl to go through that line by line, and use the Google Maps Geocoding API to convert the addresses to Lat/Long. This is all written out into an XML file (it’s quite verbose because I only wanted to do this once, and use the data for other, non-public, apps). The app itself simple JavaScript Google Maps API, that uses two cunning tricks: this Clustering code, and this code that uses the new nascent W3C geolocation standard that the iPhone3 supports, like so:

navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(foundLocation, noLocation);

function foundLocation(position)
{
  var lat = position.coords.latitude;
  var long = position.coords.longitude;
  alert('Found location: ' + lat + ', ' + long);
}
function noLocation()
{
  alert('Could not find location');
}

It’s not perfect, as I say. The app loads all of the country’s shops in one go, which is data-heavy to say the least, which makes it slow. It doesn’t show an icon where it thinks you are. It needs information available for each pointer. And so on: email me. I’m doing more work on it later in the week.

The art department, led by Andrew Diprose, have done a stellar job. The magazine is full of easter-eggs: the cover’s secret messages, the hidden pictures of the editorial staff, cunningly placed extracts from (Condé Nast’s Editorial Director) Nicholas Coleridge’s latest novel, and more.

And we’re also featuring our new contributing editors, Jer “Blprnt” Thorp, and Geoff “Bldgblog” Manaugh, for the first time. Tom Steinberg, planetary-scale engineering, the evolution of ballet, and Chanel’s new perfume technology, all feature, alongside David Allen, Kevin Kelly, and 7 Nobel Prize winners.

Meanwhile, we’re sending issue 4 to print tomorrow. And that, my friends, is even better.

While the first issue was quite dramatic to produce, this one seems, a month in retrospect, to have been a lot smoother, and better for it. It’s a tremendously exciting issue, I think: everyone did a stellar job transitioning to the monthly cycle after spending so much time on the first one.

The highlights are really too many – I’m biased, of course, but I really do think it’s a cracking mix of stuff – but I must point out a few things. The investigation into the Internet Watch Foundation, which I commissioned C J Davies to write, is a very good thing. When an unelected group of anonymous officials get to censor the UK internet, it’s exactly the thing we want to look into. It’ll be online soon, but is better read on paper, and the accompanying photography by Phillip Toledano fulfilled a long held ambition to commission him too, thanks to Steve Peck, our photo editor.

Then there’s the Jack Schulze “Here and There” map of New York, and Angela Saini’s exposé of murder, neurology, and charlatan science; Joshua Davies’ look inside the world’s biggest diamond heist, and Warren Ellis’s scary robot future, not to mention a cartoon by Chris Ware, and the best optical illusion ever. I’m really proud of this issue: just wait until you see the next one…

^*(Yes, I know there was a three year run of Wired in the UK a decade ago, but to call our magazine a relaunch is something of a stretch – a totally different team, within a totally different company, with a totally different design and editorial philosophy, writing about a totally different world: it’s just not the same thing. I loved the old one too, and props for remembering it, but enough already.)

Hugh Levinson, the masterful editor at BBC Radio Current Affairs, had me make a documentary for Radio 4’s “The Report” on the threat of cyberwar. It broadcast today. You can download the mp3 from here.

Apart from the excuse to work with the legendary Bill Law, the production meant I got to talk to the head of the MI5 offshoot, the CPNI, or Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure: a person so secret that at the conference we attended, neither the agenda, nor name badges, could mention a name, nor was anything on the record. A person so secret that their assistants were also anonymous. A person so secret, that come the Q&A, everyone in the room asked her questions by name, and then got annoyed when I pointed out just how much bullshit this Being Really Secret thing is. Have a listen…

Training for this thing, since May last year with gaps for broken bones, has been one of the best things I’ve done: physically it’s harder than ultramarathoning, and mentally too. But more to the point, as a form of meditation boxing is the finest I’ve ever tried. There’s nothing for being put into the moment like a large man trying to hit you. And while it still gets my heart pounding to spar – my twice-weekly sessions in the ring leave me feeling more serene and happier than any spiritual retreat ever could. I think it’s because in the ring, at least, everything becomes real. There’s nothing less ironic, less bullshitty, than getting punched in the head, unblinking, and ducking out to hit him back. I fucking love it.

Spring Awakening has been talked about enough – the reviews are astounding – and entirely deserved. It’s great: go see, even if you don’t like musicals. It’s quite special, I think.

Cut and Paste isn’t a musical: it’s more Mortal Combat than that. Put four designers on stage, project their monitors on to big screens, give them a theme and fifteen minutes, and run the whole thing in front of an shouty, beered-up audience of their peers. You might get the idea from a few pictures here. Bloody great. In the future, everything will be thunderdomed.

Then today, I’ve been playing with Arduino, which I’d been avoiding in the worry that I’d find it far too moreish. I was right to be worried: after only a few hours, I’ve linked a light-sensing circuit on my desk to this webpage. Sure, it’s a simple light-dependent resistor today, but tomorrow…well, tomorrow I have about a zillion things to build. (First to get the phrase “Radiological Alarm! They’ve Got Nukes!” out of my head, however.)

Meanwhile, optimism is the thing, data is seductive material according to Jones, the editor of Wired US is better with arduino than I am, Ed Dowding ponders Twitter, Russell Davies talks about his experience writing for, well, me, (for which I daily thank tptb), and Launch Your Line has me reaching for old notebooks. Hmmm.

I’m currently Associate Editor of the UK edition of Wired magazine; David Rowan’s number 2 on Condé Nast’s big 2009 launch. The first issue is out on April 2nd, this coming Thursday. It’s an amazingly exciting time. Launching a print magazine in the middle of a big recession, just as some would declare print “dead”, is something of an audacious, perhaps even foolhardy, move.

But we don’t think so. As I’ll talk about here later in the week, while a recession is a bad time to do something badly, it’s the perfect time to do something well. We think a print magazine of extreme ambition – in words, pictures, design, production and journalistic values – is sure to prosper. Hell, if quality isn’t enough, then we’re all doomed, and in the meantime I’m extremely proud to be part of a team that is producing what we are. You might not like it, and that’s fine with us, but you will have to admit that it’s good. In any case, we’re not producing a mediocre magazine for the general reader. We’re making something great specifically for the Wired audience. As David Simon once said, “fuck the average viewer.”

Now, we’ve been a little shy lately. Getting a new magazine off the ground requires a lot of uninterrupted thought, and we still don’t like people calling us, but PR people can email the entire team at wired.pr@condenast.co.uk. Journalists can pitch us all at wired.editorial@condenast.co.uk. We do read these mailboxes, and the mail is routed to the correct person. There are contributors’ guidelines available too: just ask.

Issue 2 is heading towards the printers as I type, and I’m currently working on issue 3 (and commissioning up to December’s issue), but more on that towards the end of the week. In the meantime, look out for the first issue in the shops from this week. It’s really good.

Glad to be back. There’s much to tell.