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.

If you just go to Google Books and click through to the Spy section, you’ll start with I think is the last issue published, the March 1998 edition. It may make you sad–it features John F. Kennedy Jr., the year before his passing. (It also taunts him for the “stumbles” of his George magazine, which ended up outliving Spy by several years.) Besides, Spy‘s best years were its early ones. So go here and sample from the first issues, whether you read them at the time or have never experienced Spy.

Up until now, most of the major magazine additions to Google Books have involved still-extant publications (such as Popular Science and Popular Mechanics) or defunct ones (such as Life) from companies that are still around. It’s good to know that significant magazines may make their way onto Google Books even if their publishers aren’t here to grant permission and help out.

As I’ve said before, I love Google Books so much that I feel guilty bringing this up–but it’s still not a terribly satisfactory way to read magazines. If you don’t know that Spy‘s there, you might not find it:  As far as I can tell, there’s no way to search for magazines by name. I also see no way to search a specific title, then sort the results in chronological order. The digitization of SPY is also tad sloppy–a half-dozen later issues apparently don’t have month/year data associated with them, so they appear before the first issue. Basically, it still feels like a book site that’s been slightly rejiggered for magazines.

You might be waiting for Honeycomb or Google Music or some other Google product we know is on its way. Me, I’m dying for Google Magazines–a site devoted entirely to capturing as much of the world’s magazines as possible and making it at least as easy to read them online as it was in dead-tree form. I have no evidence that such a site is in the works. But we’re talking Google here, so it would be startling if it didn’t show up sooner or later….

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!

From the magazine rack at my local Lucky supermarket:

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.

Tapping on any story lets you read it in its entirety without leaving the app–Flipboard embeds Web pages from the originating sites, and loads them in the background so they pop up instantly when you’re ready to read.  You can also read Facebook comments and retweets, comment and retweet yourself, and share items by e-mail. One thing you can’t do is use Flipboard when you don’t have an Internet connection: It loads content on the fly and doesn’t cache it.

Flipboard’s interface is one of the most…well, iPaddy ones I’ve seen to date. The typography and photos look beautiful; it artfully formats pages on the fly in both portrait and landscape mode; and its distinctive page-flipping animation is clever without being annoying. As long as people on social networks keep sharing items, the magazine never runs out of pages–you can just keep flipping.

The magazine-like presentation and generally clean look makes perusing content feel downright relaxing–a very different experience from wading through the clutter of Facebook or drinking from the Twitter firehouse. It’s extremely slick, and at least as inviting a reimagining of the magazine for the tablet era as anything I’ve seen from an actual periodical publisher.

At  the moment, Flipboard sorts the stories in a section based mostly on time: the stuff at the front is whatever’s freshest. I think there’s enormous potential for the app to get cooler by organizing things in a more sophisticated manner, so the “stories” that are likely to be most interesting are most prominent. That’s the goal, Flipboard executives told me–and to help it happen, the company has just acquired The Ellerdale Project, a company that indexes and analyzes real-time data from sources such as Twitter.

Flipboard is free; cofounder Mike McCue (who I first met almost twenty years ago when he started a Windows utility company called Paper Software) told me that the startup plans to make money by eventually inserting pages of fancy magazine-style advertising into the app. It’s also contemplating the possibility of for-pay premium content offerings. And while Flipboard is iPad-only for now, its creators plan to bring it to additional platforms.

Herewith, some images of this neat app:

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.

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.

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?

It’s not perfect–it’s an alphabetical listing, so you need to slog through three pages to see everything, and it won’t work once Google gets hundreds or thousands of titles online–but it’s a vast improvement on the previous state of affairs.

Some things about Google’s magazine project still confuse me. Why, for instance, is IDG’s weekly computer trade publication InfoWorld in Google Print, while its other weekly computer trade publication, Computerworld, lives in Google News, where it’s almost impossible to find unless you know how?

I still think we need a Google Magazines–a site devoted entirely to periodicals, and tailored to making it as easy as possible to browse, search, and find ‘em. And I think the odds are pretty good that we’ll get one. Soon would be good…

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.