@jambarama: Ah, yes – journalism! To bad they deprecated that, and they are planning to completely phase it out of all media by 2020.

Except for blogs of course, since loggers are not journalists by trade or definition and therefore they are free to engage in acts of journalism if they choose too. :)

Oh, and I was not saying Wired is bad. I was just saying it more of a general interest magazine with a technology profile. It is not targeted at software developers but at general technology enthusiasts. You will still find interesting articles there. It’s just not a developer magazine.

Magazines can provide something blogs can’t – real journalism. It is rare in tech magazines. Most just reword press releases from tech firms, or run meaningless benchmarks to give pretty graphs. Which is no different than the vast majority of news everywhere – just opinion & prefabbed press releases. However, occasionally you get real journalism.

Wired is typically just an ad rag, but sometimes you get a total gem. Some examples to prove my point. This article on “sea cowboys” I thought was totally engrossing (despite the queer title). The old article on xanadu was fascinating. There are plenty of others that I thought were very engaging.

If you want really specific information, there is no beating the internet generally or very narrowly focused publications. But if you want interesting tech journalism, you could do a lot worse than something like Wired.

@mcai8sh4: Very true on the variety. I was just getting at how the Long Tail is beneficial to the online magazines and potentially detrimental to print. Perhaps this compartmentalization is not as big of an issue as I suspected.

Re: music – indeed, I do not usually talk about music much. I like a catchy tune just like the next guy, but I actually don’t really think about it much. I pretty much categorize music into two groups: stuff I like, and stuff I don’t care for. And there is usually something that I like in every genre out there which makes the question “what music do you listen too” a moot point.

I do have a vague idea which stuff I am not supposed to like in public – for example I know that in most cases if a popular pop song comes up on the radio you are supposed to make a frowny face and say something about it being just two beats repeated over and over and how it’s not art. Unless you are amongst people who enjoy this type of music, and then you are supposed to make frowny faces whenever a song with a guitar solo in it comes on. Sigh… It’s hard to keep track of this sometimes.

There is this whole social ritual involved here which involves stereotypes and personality traits tied to different music genres. Half the time when people ask you about music, they do it so that they can figure out what kind of a person you are.

The problem is that I don’t really have a favorite genre, band or a song. It is difficult to pick few representative ones when someone asks me. I mean, I could probably figure out a good genre based on the stereotypes attached to it, and then just learn couple factoids about bands from that genre so that my music choices project just the right image of me. But that’s to much effort, and I’d rather just be myself and just have people deal with my weirdness.

Whilst you certainly have a valid point across. Due to the different component parts of any interest (including chicken farming, I’d imagine), you can read about the parts that interest you online. I have found though, that only reading the parts that you think will interest you, you can miss alot of other information, that might intrigue. By reading printed mags (on any topic) you can get a more varied understanding on the subject. As your (toilet) reading is focused on the articles in the publication.
One of the things I like about this blog is the variety. I’m not just reading about python, or linux… but lots of other subjects as well**.
I’m not a big RPG person, but I learn things about it that I would never actually search for – this is good.
With this in mind, the demise of good quality printed publications is a great shame.
** thinking about it, you’ve covered computing, games, tv, film, irritations… but not music – I don’t mean DRM, or what type of encoding you prefer, I’m thinking more music in general. Maybe not a big part of your life.