The Official HotWired FAQ
ver. 3.1 - 5/24/95
HotWired is the official Web site of HotWired Ventures LLC.
If you are having problems connecting to HotWired and cannot find an answer to your question on our help pages, please send email to support.
Please take a minute to read through this handy Frequently Asked Question list. It is designed to help you with the following questions:
- What is HotWired about?
- Does HotWired cost anything?
- What can I do with my member name and password?
- How do I contact a human at HotWired?
- What are the channels of HotWired about?
- How do I participate in HotWired?
What is HotWired about?
Just as television wasn't radio with pictures, the Net isn't magazines with buttons - or worse, video-on-demand. Instead, it's a new medium demanding new thinking, new content.
Today's events mirror television's arrival as a mass medium in 1948. Global networks are connecting people with captivating words, pictures, sounds, and ideas from around the world. Online communities are beginning to find their voice. Passive entertainment is passé. Through interactivity, people do not talk back to machines - they connect to one another.
We're building something rich and strange. Full of discussion, dialog,
commentary, art, sound, and vision. Help us define the future of this new
medium.
Does HotWired cost anything?
No. HotWired is free. But you do need a live TCP/IP Internet connection to visit HotWired. If you don't know how to do this, we have a series of free articles called "Getting Wired." To retrieve this file via basic Internet email, send a message to:
info-rama@hotwired.com with the words
send getting.wired
in the body of the message.
This will hopefully give you a place to start.
You also need a compatible Web browser to access HotWired. Please read our page
of recommended browsers.
What can I do with my member name and password
Your member name will allow you to be recognized by other HotWired users in Club Wired if you should join a chat session, and it will be your signature when you post a message in the Threads section. It gives you a unique identity on HotWired.
Aside from verifying your identity, registration information allows us
to offer each user a customized online environment. For example,
HotWired generates a
"What's new"
page for each user that lists all of the content that the user hasn't
yet seen. Your registration also allows us to tell our
sponsors
exactly how many people have seen their banners. Providing our
sponsors with this information allows us to make HotWired available to
you, free of charge. Without sponsorship we could not do that.
How do I contact a human at HotWired?
If you are having trouble with HotWired, please see the Need Help page, for information on how to contact the support team.
If you think you've found a bug while using HotWired, please send a description of the problem, along with the type and version of the Web browser you're using, and the type of computer you're using, to bugs. We appreciate your help!
If you are a member of the press and want to arrange an interview as part of a story on HotWired, please contact our publicist, Joshua Grossnickle at +1 (415) 222 6334 or send email to press@hotwired.com.
If you are a literary, entertainment, or PR agent, and would like to arrange an online speaking appearance in Club Wired for a client, please contact Susanna Camp, at +1 (415) 222 6355 or send email to clubwired@hotwired.com.
If you have publicity or press release information or would like
more information about interviews or visiting the HotWired office,
please email Joshua Grossnickle at
publicity@hotwired.com.
What are the channels of HotWired about?
HotWired's channels are like different doorways into the digital revolution. Technology, Way New journalism, the arts, commerce, and the hubbub of electronic conversation can be found in Adrenaline, Signal, World Beat, Renaissance 2.0, Piazza, and Wired. Expect plenty of overlap and cross-talk.
ADRENALINE Adrenaline is for athletes who take the world as their playing field: surfers, mountain bikers, climbers, disc throwers, rafters, and others. Hook up with Adrenaline's worldwide database, the Core, that keeps you up-to-the-minute on trail, river, and surf conditions and sports news.
SIGNAL takes the pulse of the Digital Revolution. We write news about where to go and what to see on the Net, spread industry gossip, and review advances - and regressions - in communications technology.
WORLD BEAT covers travel and culture for the next millennium. Digital dispatches, reports from the road and interactive features transport you into the neighborhoods of the world. Our essential database is a traveler's best friend, powered by the travel publishing experts at Rough Guide.
PIAZZA is the heart of HotWired, the central square where members, writers, and artists can exchange information, criticism, love letters, and business cards. We have live guests in our Club Wired auditorium and gateways to distant virtual worlds.
RENAISSANCE 2.0 is a set of digital galleries that will either blow your mind or crash your computer. Sounds, videos, pictures, and words from artists all over the world - commercial and anti-commercial - melodic and anti-melodic - beautiful and brilliantly unbeautiful. RENAISSANCE also features TWAIN, an engaging spotlight on the best new literature for the digital literati.
WIRED is Wired magazine online, where HotWired members can shop
for WiredWare and subscribe to the magazine. WIRED also contains
archives of issues, with every individual article available.
How can I participate in HotWired?
We are looking for the best and brightest digital artists, correspondents, musicians, dreamers, and realists for HotWired's Renaissance 2.0 section. We have only one instruction to potential contributors: Amaze us! If you are doing amazing work, check out this URL on how to submit your work to Rennaissance:
Or, send us a brief written (plain text) synopsis on any of the following:
moving images - video or animation (QuickTime or MPEG)
email: movies@hotwired.com
still images - photographs, comics, original electronic art (GIF or JPEG)
email: stills@hotwired.com
music and sounds - samples, loops, songs, full orchestral works (AU or AIFF)
email: sounds@hotwired.com
writing - fiction, poetry, essays (ASCII, RTF, MS Word, or HTML)
email: text@hotwired.com
Note: Please don't send your files! We'll contact you if we like your idea. We'll pay for the best, and return soothing rejection letters to the rest.
The HotWired Team - hotwired-info@hotwired.com
