THE CONNECTIVE

We need your help! Starting at 3pm PST on April 26, the Wired Insider team is going to whip together an entire stand-alone tablet issue in just 48 hours. We're calling it The Connective, and it's going to be reported, written, photographed, and designed over the course of a single weekend. Who would be up to this nutty task? YOU, hopefully. Here's how it works. We'll announce the issue's theme on 4/26, and then you'll have 24 hours to report, write, sketch, photograph something based on that theme. The following day we'll hurry to put the crowd-sourced content into an awesome package—editing, fact checking, and designing the best that you've brought us. And voila! A magazine. Visit the official Connective site HERE. Presented by WIRED, brought to you by Cisco

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Get The Connective!

After spending 48 hours furiously writing, editing, and designing (and many, many more hours anxiously awaiting its final release), we’re so thrilled to announce that The Connective, a crowd-sourced magazine created in a single weekend, is finally live and available for download. You can find it in the Wired container. Now go get it!

Download Now

iPad

Download the free WIRED iPad® Edition from the App Store.

Tap the WIRED cover in your Newsstand folder to open the app.

Tap The Connective cover and download for free.

Kindle Fire

Go to the Newsstand on your device.

Search for WIRED.

Download and install the app to your device.

Tap The Connective cover and download for free.

NOOK Color™ or NOOK Tablet™

To access The Connective on the NOOK you must subscribe from BN.com or from your NOOK Color™ or NOOK Tablet™ using your BN.com account.

Google Play™

Tap on the Google Play™ Store app on your Android device.

Tap on “Magazines” and search for WIRED

Tap the magazine application.

Tap The Connective and download for free.

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The Connective is out 5/17!

You can find The Connective on the Wired newsstand in iTunes on May 17th. We can't wait to share it with you!

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Time's up! We're done!

As you beamed us your stories from cafés on the other side of the world and photos from buses in our own neighborhood, as you brainstormed story ideas on Twitter and borrowed public Wi-Fi in Amsterdam and Scranton, we were working in Google Drive to co-write this letter and sensing each other’s minds meld in real time.

We witnessed a mass transmit of big and medium-size data, of traffic patterns, of mood swings and bustling metrics. We cheered your names as they flew across the wire. 

There’s something weird, exciting, and fascinating about this massive transfer of information. You sent us stories about heavily networked cities and places beyond the reach of broadband.

Some of these ideas heightened our hope for the future and the embracing of our devices. Others raised complex questions that we're still pondering. But the bottom line is, good or bad, the information is out there – and more available than ever before. We are just starting to mine it for answers.

Soon you'll see our final product, our best shot at representing the zeitgeist of your amazing responses, a collection of thoughts from a 48-hour sprint in the year 2013. But this is just the starting block. There are so many more implications to discuss, more questions to dream up, more data to disseminate, more asteroids to explode. What happens from here is to be determined.

—The Connective Editors

Stay tuned for a behind-the-scenes look at the making of The Connective and additional content surrounding our theme, Mass Transmit.

(above image by Niv Bavarsky)

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Thank you!

Submissions are now closed. We're so thrilled with all you've shared with us. Now it's time for you to wish us luck! Over the next 24 hours, we'll hustle to edit, fact check, and design our favorites. And by 3pm Pacific tomorrow, we'll have a magazine! More details coming soon. Stay tuned!

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The theme is MASS TRANSMIT

Your phone’s newest trick is small potatoes; it’s just one tiny Internet-enabled ingredient in the feast of connected objects in our lives. And together these objects are a glimpse into a strange and exciting future, where the world isn't just about people but also about the information those people create. Think beyond smart thermostats and shoes with wireless chips. In the future, our rooftops will shout out our exciting news before we even mount the stairs.

Soon there will be a sensor for everything and data collected everywhere. Things will talk to other things and talk to us— sometimes with sass. (Siri's got nothin' on what's yet to come.) The information and ideas exchanged in this Mass Transmit will help us do small things (like get to work on time and eat healthier) and big ones (like become more efficient farmers and better-informed citizens). The effects will be personal, industrial, and global. Mass Transmit will change how we understand one another, altering our actual human interactions.

There's something weird, exciting, and fascinating about this massive information transfer. We want you to find the signal in this noise. Bring us your bizarre, shocking, sad, hard-hitting, silly, and incredible stories about how the conversations from thing to thing to people are changing the way we live now and how they will shape our future.

You have until 3pm PST on Saturday (aka tomorrow) to submit your work. Do that here.

And you're not alone. We'll be here for you. Have a question about your story? Want to brainstorm with us? Feeling confused about something? The digital world will connect us! Tweet us at @WIREDInsider with the hashtag #TheConnective or email us at [email protected], and we'll work together to tell your story.

-- The Connective Editors

(Psssst. Story ideas and more guidance directly below.)

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Let's Get Going

And the theme is MASS TRANSMIT!!!

We want your features and short pieces, infographics and lists, photos and illustrations, original sounds and videos. We want something new—something unique—that you make in the next 24 hours. We want to see real stories and we want you to get out into the world, put your feet on the ground, and tell us what you see.

Let's tell stories about people and how the sensor and Internet-connected world has changed them, affected their lives, and made things possible that wouldn't have been before.

Let's put together some graphs, charts, and infographics—get our hands on some of this data and represent it visually in a way that helps us all better understand it.

Let’s make music and videos that capture the phenomenon. Did you know the Mathematica software can turn equations into sound? Just sayin’.

Let's do short-takes on companies and people that are connecting to each other and the world in interesting ways. How does this give us a glimpse into what’s in store for the future? Let's look at the gadgets and technologies that make this all possible and the people that dreamed them up. Let's talk about how scientists, researchers, engineers, and the world's thinkers are tapping into this phenomenon—to use it to enhance their work or to better understand the future. Let's conduct interviews with musicians and filmmakers who are asking fans to use their devices and bandwidth to collect sights and sounds all over the world and using them to make creative new projects.

Let's compose photo essays and illustrations of the human connections we make through our digital ones.

We want YOUR stories!

Here's what we don't want:

Don't send us work that you've already created. Don't send us fiction or poetry.

Can’t wait to see what you’ve come up with!

You have until 3pm PST on Saturday (aka tomorrow) to submit your work. Do that here.

And you're not alone. We'll be here for you. Have a question about your story? Want to brainstorm with us? Feeling confused about something? The digital world will connect us! Tweet us at @WIREDInsider with the hashtag #TheConnective or email us at [email protected], and we'll work together to tell your story.

-- The Connective Editors

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Final Theme Hint:

"While playing around with the Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) we discovered an amazing number of open embedded devices on the Internet. Many of them are based on Linux and allow login to standard BusyBox with empty or default credentials. We used these devices to build a distributed port scanner to scan all IPv4 addresses. These scans include service probes for the most common ports, ICMP ping, reverse DNS and SYN scans. We analyzed some of the data to get an estimation of the IP address usage." ~ from Internet Census 2012. 

Contributing to The Connective this weekend? If so, where are you on this map? We can't wait to see what you make! 

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We'll be giving you one last real hint in just a little bit, but consider this trailer, well, a teaser. Back soon!

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Today's the day! We announce our theme at 3 p.m. Pacific. We can't wait to see what everyone comes up with.

In the meantime, please enjoy this clip wherein Johnny Mnemonic uses the VR "Global Net" - in a future that exists 8 years from now - to make a long distance phone call. It's almost like he can find everything on the internet.

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"This interconnected networks of networks is called the internet."

Let's take it back to the basics for a minute. The basics - in this case - are those bygone days when we were still learning all the things the internet could do.   

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1993? 2013? AT&T said we will, and now we do.

What will we be doing 20 years from now? 

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Today's Theme Hint:

Ok, today's hint is a little more fun than the ones we've given you so far. It's Data from Star Trek singing a little ditty about how much fun he has searching for life forms. 

"You precious little life forms. Where. Are. You?!"

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Ok, this project is cool. The band Light Light has put up this site that is making a crowdsourced music video using the motion of all the cursors of people who come to check it out. Watch it and find out where all the other cursors are from and where they want to travel to. There might even be a few horse limes out there... Just like you!

We're getting close to the launch of The Connective and getting very amped up. Go listen to Light Light's track and get on our wavelength! 

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What does 91,585 people + $5,702,153 equal? One fully funded Veronica Mars movie.

If you build it, they will come. (Also, crowdsourcing works!) 

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Henry Rollins breaking down the pitfalls of "information overload" to Keanu Reeves in Johnny Mnemonic (in very crass language, sheesh). 

We tend to be more utopian than dystopian when it comes to the future, but he's got a point: Once great technology is in our lives, it becomes very hard to live without it. 

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For example, mobile phone positioning data is proposed and applied as one promising movement data collecting method, providing advantages over traditional methods of traffic measurement (e.g. road-survey questionnaires, traffic counters, travel diaries).

This quote - from the study "Mobile Phones in a Traffic Flow" - is today's hint. We're getting closer... 

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Jason Schwartzman: "Everything is the same, even if it’s different."  

Dustin Hoffman: "Exactly. Because we. Are. Connected."

~ Dustin Hoffman knows what we're talking about.