In a shocking instance of dereliction of duty, I’ve failed until now to mention the best tech-related news of 2011 (so far): Last week, Google added Spy magazine–”The New York Monthly”–to the ever-growing collection of magazines available for free in Google Books. (According to Spy co-founder Kurt Andersen, half the issues are up now and the rest are on their way.)

When Spy debuted in 1986, its quirky, snarky, endlessly inventive sensibility was unique. It soon influenced just about every other magazine on the planet, and you can still spot traces of its attitude everywhere. In fact, the entire blogosphere has a Spy-like feel, including reams of stuff written by people who have never read the magazine and might not even be aware of its existence.

Spy made an indelible impression on me: In fact, browsing through Google’s archive, I immediately identified the first issue–October 1987–which I ever encountered, and remembered perusing it at my desk during lunch.

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If you pick up the issue of TIME magazine that came out today–it’s cover dated November 1st, with the cover story “How to Restore the American Dream”–you’ll find a name you may know on page 75: mine. Actually, two familiar names, since it’s my byline appearing on Technologizer’s first appearance in print. (The article is an updated version of a TIME.com column I did recently on Internet TV boxes–Apple TV, Roku, Google TV, and the upcoming Boxee Box.)

As much fun as it is to write for the Web, it’s fun for the world of Technologizer to burst off the Internet and into a magazine, too–and I couldn’t ask for a cooler home than TIME. Buy a few copies and tell your friends!

I don’t think that Wired and Scientific American coordinated their issue planning this month–they’re competitors, at least sort of–but the two covers sure make for a cool matched set.

From the magazine rack at my local Lucky supermarket:

Apple’s App Store is jam-packed with digital magazines for the iPad, some of which are pretty darn slick. But they all have something in common: For reasons that aren’t clear, Apple isn’t permitting their publishers to offer subscriptions to them.

A new iPad app called Flipboard is launching tonight. It aims to put a fresh new interface on social content by giving it one of the most venerable interfaces of them all: that of a magazine–complete with a cover, sections, and pages full of stories you can flip through.

Flipboard gives you a section of photos and other items your friends have shared on Facebook and one based on your friends’ Twitter activity. You can also choose sections (based on Twitter lists) which pull in articles on topics such as politics, tech, and fashion–or plug in any Twitter account or Twitter list to create a custom section.

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The long-rumored entry of publishing behemoth Hearst into the e-reader game is now official. And it’s not an e-reader, it’s an e-reader platform–offered by a new standalone company being launched by Hearst. Skiff says it’ll distribute magazines, newspapers, and books in attractively-formatted versions to a variety of e-readers, smartphones, and other devices. It won’t sell a device, but it’s partnering with chip company Marvell and wireless provider Sprint to help other companies make Skiff-enabled gadgets for sale starting next year.

The most interesting part of this news is not that there will be even more readers to choose from in 2010, but that Skiff is paying attention to the presentation of periodicals. Today’s readers, such as the Kindle, work okay for publications that are mostly hundreds of pages of plain text. But the magazines and newspapers I’ve seen in reader form have been really disappointing, since they’ve lost all the artful melding of type, imagery (preferably color imagery), and other elements that continue to make dead trees one of the best technologies ever invented for conveying information. Nor do you get the interactivity and community that the Web versions of the same publications provide (for free, yet).

The magazines I’ve subscribed to on the Kindle feel like a mashup of aspects of the Web and print–but it’s the worst aspects. The best ones are all left out. I wrote about this in a recent guest post for Folio, and while the Skiff site mostly offers tantalizing vision rather than specifics, I’m encouraged to see that the company’s tackling the problem, at least. Even though I think time is running out for companies to launch new devices and services dedicated to e-reading, unless they’re compatible with absolutely everything else that’s out there.

Good grief! Kiplinger’s Personal Finance has published its Best of Everything 2009 feature, which provides picks for everything from mutual funds to cars to colleges to travel deals. It’s also got a category for “Best Tech Gadget Guru,” and Kiplinger’s choice in that category is…me!

Whether he’s discussing Microsoft’s mobile-phone software or praising a cool netbook,HARRY MCCRACKEN doesn’t mince words. His Technologizer site (www.technologizer.com) is a fast and furious way to keep up on the latest tech trends. His blog has quickly become one of the most influential sites for tech news and opinion.

I’m flattered–many thanks to the good folks at Kiplinger’s for such a nice honor.

I long ago gave up on trying to cover every weird rejection of an application intended for Apple’s iPhone App Store, but this one merits quick mention. Tom Richmond, the excellent caricaturist whose work appears in MAD these days, has blogged about an app he co-created. It’s a guide to senators and members of congress that lets you look up any elected official by GPS or Zip code and get some basic information about him or her, including contact info. Useful, no?

Well, it also includes a depiction of each public servant as a bobblehead doll, using Richmond’s caricatures, and you can bobble their heads by nudging them with your finger. Pretty clever, and no more offensive than any other well-done example of political cartooning. But it apparently ran afoul of an App Store regulation that forbids apps which “Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable, for example, materials that may be considered obscene, pornographic, or defamatory.”

The rejection doesn’t exactly come as a surprise. Actually, we already knew that Apple doesn’t like apps that have fun at the expense of public figures: an app called Someecards with snarky, topical e-cards only got accepted after its creators edited out cards that Apple didn’t like like. The rejection of Richmond’s app, Bobble Rep, seems to suggest that even gentle humor of the sort that this nation has enjoyed for, oh, its entire existence is beyond the pale.

As TechCrunch’s MG Siegler reported, Google’s Android folks took note of Someecards’ woes, reached out, and invited the company behind it to create an uncensored Android edition. Maybe Bobble Rep will go Android, too. But does anyone out there want to argue that Apple shouldn’t take a deep breath and permit these apps onto the App Store? Isn’t political humor a positively American activity?

I mean, how is Bobble Rep different from the item below, which the iTunes Store cheerfully offers–except that it’s an iPhone app, not a Will Ferrell movie?

I keep writing about the wonders of Google Books’ archive of scanned magazines–most notably, the utter delight that is the complete LIFE. Every time I do, I pause to wonder why it’s practically impossible to find a magazine unless you know it’s there. Problem solved, mostly: Google Books now has a page with thumbnail images of all the magazines to be found there.

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We don’t even know for sure whether Apple will ever release a tablet–although there’s lots of compelling evidence that it will–and already there’s a lively debate about whether the company is interested in using said tablet to do to printed reading materials what iTunes has done for music.

Until recently, the smart money seemed to be on Apple staying out of the e-reader fray–cue references to Steve Jobs saying that nobody reads anymore. But over at Gizmodo, Brian Lam is reporting that Apple has been in talks with publishers of textbooks, newspapers (the New York Times, specifically), and magazines–presumably as it gets ready to announce its tablet. Maybe the company is interested in catering to those of us who do read after all.

I hope so–and as a former magazine guy, I’m most interested to see what Apple might do with the medium I left behind but for which I’ll never lose my affinity. For all the things that are right with Amazon.com’s Kindle e-book reader, its treatment of magazines is pretty horrible. It may have signed deals to offer thirty-six well-known titles, but every Kindle magazine I’ve seen has been stripped of most of its formatting, graphics, and…life. There’s no particular benefit to Kindle magazines except for saving some trees and space on your coffee table, especially when far more dynamic, engaging, interesting versions of most of the same content is available for free on the Web.

And ultimately, I don’t think largely static downloadable magazines such as those offered by Amazon (as well as PDF-like print replicas such as Zinio versions) are going to revolutionize anything. We don’t need new formats for magazines that compete with the Web–we need to use Web technologies to create more compelling digital versions of traditionally pulp-based publications. An electronic version of, say, the New Yorker shouldn’t be an entirely different beast from NewYorker.com. It should be a variant that can be pushed to a device (be it from Amazon or Apple) and read even when you’re offline, with slicker type, graphics, and overall presentation than the Web currently permits. And what the heck–it should retain the wonderfully browsable, print-oriented concepts of a cover, a table, of contents, and a sequence of pages from beginning to end. (In this case, it should also involve cartoons interspersed throughout, which you can choose to read first.)

Like Web pages, these magazines should work on multiple devices from different manufacturers–if Newsweek is available in slightly different, incompatible variants for the Kindle and Apple’s tablet, it’s just going to drive everybody crazy.

Oh, and whoever solves this problem needs to figure out issues of screen orientation–one of the big gotchas with Zinio magazines is that they’re portrait-oriented publications in the mostly landscape-oriented world of computer displays.

I don’t know if Brian’s story is right on the money–and if it is, I have no idea what Apple has in mind. But I do know that even though I don’t currently subscribe to any digital magazines, I’d happily plunk down my money for ones that got the format right. So far, nothing’s come close. I’m a happy optimist, so I’m assuming this will get solved relatively soon–if not by Apple, by somebody.

I’m not sure how I managed to miss this, but as far as I’m concerned it’s the month’s best tech-related news. On Wednesday, Google announced that Google Books has published the entire run of the most famous incarnation of LIFE magazine–almost 1900 issues, spanning 1936 to 1972. It’s the perfect complement to Google Images’ astonishing LIFE photo archive, and as useful a reference work on several eventful decades of American history as we’re going to get in one place.

The only downer is a basic undeniable fact that Google can’t do anything about: LIFE was an oversized tabloid-format publication–taller than it was wide–and computer displays are defiantly horizontal, and limited in resolution. Reading LIFE in your browser feels a little like scanning through issues using a virtual microfilm machine, despite conveniences such as thumbnails of pages and a zoom feature. (Tip: For the best reading experience, choose the full-screen mode and the facing-pages view, then zoom the magazine to fill the screen. You’ll still have to squint a little, but it’ll be worth it.)

Okay, Google Books does offer one feature that makes its LIFE archive infinitely more useful than microfilm could ever be: full-text searching of the magazine’s entire history. That’s how I’m finding gems like this 1963 feature on Polaroid’s first 60-second film and this 1964 ad for a Sony TV with a four-inch screen. There are still things about Google Books’ interface I don’t understand, such as why there doesn’t seem to be any browsable list of magazine titles that would make it easier to locate a particular publication. (LIFE is plastered all over over the Google Book home page at the moment, but when they bump it for something else it’ll be surprisingly difficult to find.) I also can’t figure out a way to search a particular publication, then sort the results by date. (I wanted to see when LIFE first mentioned computers, a topic it would cover heavily over the years.)*

But I feel guilty for being critical here–LIFE on Google Books may not be perfect, but that doesn’t prevent it from being sheer joy.
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*I just figured out how to do this–it involves using advanced search and then entering the name of the magazine in a field confusingly labeled “Return books with the title.” Which brings up a question: Should all the magazines currently living in Google Books be spun off into something called Google Magazines?

You know a video game is popular when it spawns its own magazine.

Such is the case with World of Warcraft: The Magazine, debuting this weekend at the BlizzCon gaming convention in Anaheim, Calif. The quarterly publication has the blessing of publisher Blizzard, and it’ll be run by former Official Xbox Magazine Senior Editor Dan Amrich. Instead of being ad-supported, the magazine will subsist on straight sales, with $39.95 getting you a yearly subscription.

Ars Technica’s Ben Kuchera has a pretty good rundown of the reasons and roadblocks for the magazine, including the token “print is dead” disclaimer. But I actually think World of Warcraft: The Magazine has a decent chance of surviving.

It’s at least got a better shot than than another upcoming pring gaming mag, Electronic Gaming Monthly. If you missed that news, EGM will relaunch under new ownership after shuttering last January. While both magazines will ride on the strength of their respective brands, World of Warcraft: The Magazine has a distinct, dedicated audience, while the general gaming crowd sought by EGM is pretty fickle. We’re likely to go anywhere for our information, provided that it’s accurate and timely. Print magazines try to argue that they provide deeper commentary and perspective, but there’s plenty of that online as well.

WoW: The Magazine’s strategy is a classic one: Fill the niche market. It’s doing the same thing as platform-specific gaming mags, like Official Xbox Magazine, but it’s even more targeted. If the magazine can nail down the interviews, profiles and insight that’s being promised, it’s got a solid product no one else has.

Indeed, Wow: The Magazine will face the same struggles as other print publications, but WoW fans could use a reason to take their eyes off the screen anyhow, and this way they don’t even have to disengage with the game.

I love doing my thing on the Web, but I’d be a liar if I told you there weren’t things I missed about being a magazine journalist. And one of the top three things I pine for is the fun (and challenge) of creating a cover every month. So I love, love, love this video which shows how my pals at Macworld put together the cover of their new issue. And as much hard work as it shows, it doesn’t capture everything involved in doing a cover, since it focuses on the photography and layout aspect of a process that also involves story ideas and wordsmithing, and sometimes multiple, significantly different mockups of different ideas.

Here’s Macworld’s story about the video.

(Side note: I may have implied that I don’t do magazine stuff anymore, but I lied–in fact, this very Macworld has a piece I wrote, on the war between Macs and Windows and why it doesn’t make anybody happier or healthier. It’s the first article I’ve written for the magazine after more than twenty years of reading it…and eventually sitting next to the people who make it.)

(Additional side note: If we’d been clever enough to do time-lapse photography of the complete PC World cover process when I was there, we’d have been required to include footage of me sweating for several weeks as I waited for newsstand sales reports to come in and tell us whether we had a hit or a flop on our hands.)

At its peak, Computer Shopper may have consumed more wood pulp each month than any other magazine of any sort, ever: It consistently ran over 1,000 pages oversized a month in the early 1990s. (I remember in part because I worked for a not-very-successful magazine that had been formed to take Shopper on head-to-head.)

The onetime behemoth will never kill another innocent tree again: SX2 Media Labs, its publisher, is discontinuing print publication to go online-only after the April issue, reports PaidContent.org. The news comes a few months after Ziff Davis folded the print version of PC Magazine, once Computer Shopper’s even more profitable stablemate. (Shopper was a Ziff publication during the fat years, though it began as an independent operation and was also owned by Cnet for a spell until SX2 bought it in 2005.)

Also recently defunct, at least as a standalone publication: the extremely venerable programming journal Dr. Dobb’s, which I remember reading in the late 1970s.

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Good news for Bostonians, traditionalists, and computer-history junkies: Out of Town News, the 54-year-old newsstand in the heart of Cambridge’s Harvard Square, won’t be closing after all. The kiosk that sold Paul Allen the copy of Popular Electronics that inspired him and Bill Gates to found a company called Micro-Soft has a new tenant that has signed a five-year lease to operate it as a newsstand.

In 2009 and beyond, Out of Town is an anachronism–the Web is the biggest “out of town newsstand” imaginable–but it’s a happy one, and one of the last remaining old-school merchants in Harvard Square. (I’m still grappling with the ugly fact that the wonderful independent bookseller Wordsworth died four years ago and that the store that claims to be the Harvard Coop is in fact an uninspiring Barnes and Noble.) May Out of Town live forever–or at least for as long as there are magazines and newspapers and people who want to buy them.

(Photo by Flickr user afagen)

JPG Magazine, the publication consisting entirely of photos submitted by its readers, is folding. The closure includes the print publication, its PDF version, and the Web site, and comes at a time when just about everybody involved in the creation of advertising-supported media properties is having a tough time of it. As Daring Fireball’s John Gruber points out, JPG’s founders were forced out in 2007, and the publication lost much of its energy thereafter.

At the peak of its buzz, JPG was sometimes held up as evidence that a magazine could get by without needless luxuries like paid contributors. I don’t think its death proves that the idea of user-generated publications is a crummy one, any more than the current trials and tribulations of media companies prove that the time of professional journalists is over. If JPG had a problem, it may have been that it was ultimately kind of redundant–thanks to Flickr, Facebook, and a zillion other places where you can share photos, the whole darn Web feels a little like an online magazine of user-created imagery.

Rest in peace, JPG–you were an interesting idea, and like many interesting ideas that die, your influence will likely be felt in more successful enterprises to come.