Wired is a bi-monthly American magazine, published in print and online editions, that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics.

[6] During the five years of Rossetto's editorship, Wired's colophon credited Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan as its "patron saint".

Wired's third editor, Chris Anderson is known for popularizing the term "the long tail",[15] as a phrase relating to a "power law"-type graph that helps to visualize the 2000s emergent new media business model.

Anderson widened the definition of the term in capitals to describe a specific point of view relating to what he sees as an overlooked aspect of the traditional market space that has been opened up by new media.

[16] The magazine coined the term crowdsourcing,[17] as well as its annual tradition of handing out Vaporware Awards, which recognize "products, videogames, and other nerdy tidbits pitched, promised and hyped, but never delivered".

Wired was originally conceived in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, when they were working on Electric Word, a small, groundbreaking technology magazine that developed a global following because of its focus not just on hardware and software, but the people, companies, and ideas that were part of what they called the language industries.

This broader focus on the social, economic, and political issues surrounding technology became the core of the Wired editorial approach.

[20] Rossetto and Metcalfe moved back to the United States to start Wired, finding the European Union not a cohesive enough media market to support a continent-wide publication.

[22] Wired’s fundraising breakthrough came when they showed a prototype to Nicholas Negroponte, founder and head of the MIT Media Lab at the February 1992 TED Conference,[23] which Richard Saul Wurman comped them to attend.

By September 1992, Wired had rented loft space in the SoMa district of San Francisco off South Park[25] and hired its first employees.

Rossetto and Metcalfe were aided in starting Wired by Ian Charles Stewart, who helped write the original business plan, John Plunkett, who designed the "Manifesto", Eugene Mosier, who provided production support to create the first prototype (and later became Art Director for Production), and Randy Stickrod, who provided Rossetto and Metcalfe refuge in his office on South Park when they first arrived in San Francisco.

Associate publisher Kathleen Lyman joined Wired from News Corporation and Ziff Davis to execute on its ambition to attract both technology and lifestyle advertising, and delivered from the first issue.

She and her protégé Simon Ferguson (Wired's first advertising manager) landed pioneering campaigns by a diverse group of industry leaders such as Apple Computer, Intel, Sony, Calvin Klein, and Absolut.

Two years after they left Amsterdam, and nearly five years after they first started work on the business plan, Metcalfe and Rossetto and their initial band of twelve Wired Ones launched Wired as a quarterly on 6 January 1993 and first distributed it by hand at Macworld Expo in San Francisco and, later that week, at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

Due to the work of John Battelle's fiancée, ex-CBS producer Michelle Scileppi, feature pieces on Wired’s launch appeared on CNN and in The San Jose Mercury News, Newsweek and Time magazines.

[32] Circulation and advertising response was so strong that Wired went bi-monthly with its next issue, and monthly by September with the William Gibson cover story about Singapore called "Disneyland with the Death Penalty", which was banned there.

Six authors of the first Wired issue (1.1) had written for Whole Earth Review, most notably Bruce Sterling (who was on the first cover) and Stewart Brand.

[34] Wired co-founder Rossetto claimed in his launch editorial that "the Digital Revolution is whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon",[35] a bold statement at the time, when there were no smart phones, web browsers, and less than 10 million users connected to the Internet around the world, barely half that in the United States.

On October 27, 1994, 20 months after its first issue, and following the introduction of the first graphic web browser Mosaic, Wired Ventures launched its Hotwired website, the first with original content and Fortune 500 advertising.

[39] Inventing the banner ad, Wired brought ATT, Volvo, MCI, Club Med and seven other companies to the web for the first time on websites built by Jonathan Nelson's Organic Online.

[40] Among the launch crew of 12 was Jonathan Steuer, who led the group, Justin Hall,[41] a pioneer blogger who ran his own successful site on the side, Howard Rheingold as executive editor, and Apache server co-creator Brian Behlendorf, who was webmaster.

[50] Wired replied that its valuation was confirmed by savvy private investors who put $12.5 million into the company in May[51] at just under the original offering stock price.

They also argued that the offering price was set by the bankers, and was merited since it pioneered web media, and its revenue at Hotwired was greater than Yahoo when it went public at a higher valuation than Wired's.

[52] For their part, Wired executives blamed Goldman for mismanaging their IPO, and then failing the company by not closing the round which already had investors booked.

The Street.com commented that a "company that started out as one of the more promising bastions of the digital revolution lost control to old-fashioned vulture capitalism".

Wired Ventures's founders and early investors threatened lawsuits against Tudor and Providence for breach of fiduciary responsibility, claiming they were engaging in unfair distribution of proceeds from the sale amounting to $50-100 million.

[63] In 2006, Condé Nast repurchased Wired Digital from Lycos, returning the website to the same company that published the magazine, reuniting the brand.

Hotwired grew into a variety of vertical content sites, including Webmonkey, Ask Dr. Weil, Talk.com, WiredNews, and the search engine Hotbot.

[72] Wired's writers have included Jorn Barger, John Perry Barlow, John Battelle, Paul Boutin, Stewart Brand, Gareth Branwyn, Po Bronson, Scott Carney, Michael Chorost, Douglas Coupland, James Daly, Joshua Davis, J. Bradford DeLong, Mark Dery, David Diamond, Cory Doctorow, Esther Dyson, Paul Ford, Mark Frauenfelder, Simson Garfinkel, Samuel Gelerman, William Gibson, Dan Gillmor, Mike Godwin, George Gilder, Lou Ann Hammond, Chris Hardwick, Virginia Heffernan, Danny Hillis, John Hodgman, Linda Jacobson, Steven Johnson, Bill Joy, Richard Kadrey, Leander Kahney, Jon Katz, Jaron Lanier, Lawrence Lessig, Paul Levinson, Steven Levy, John Markoff, Wil McCarthy, Russ Mitchell, Glyn Moody, Belinda Parmar, Charles Platt, Josh Quittner, Spencer Reiss, Howard Rheingold, Rudy Rucker, Paul Saffo, Adam Savage, Evan Schwartz, Peter Schwartz, Steve Silberman, Alex Steffen, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, Kevin Warwick, Dave Winer, Kate O’Neill, and Gary Wolf.