I started to leaf through the latest Wired magazine last night when it suddenly struck me it was a nice, hefty, advertising-packed 296 pages. This took me back to the height of the dot-com boom when magazines such as Wired, Business 2.0 (which went bi-weekly), Fast Company and the Industry Standard regularly published heavy, back-busting issues. In fact, they were so big, I got into this weird habit of ripping as many ads as I could from these paper monsters to lighten the load - there has got to be a description for this kind of behavior, right?. I don't think the high-tech magazine industry has totally rebounded back to dot-com health but it's interesting to see Wired getting thicker. Does this suggest the high-industry is becoming more optimistic? Maybe. I guess what's encouraging about Wired's return is its advertiser roster is chock-a-block with blue-chip firms such as Toyota, Sun, Acura, Motorola, Sony and Microsoft. There is a comforting absence of all those hot Web 2.0 start-ups. When you see these guys start advertising in Wired, sell everything because the party is probably over. One thing about Wired is it seems have recaptured its "cool" factor. There was a time not so long ago when Wired lost me as a reader. Perhaps it was simply information overload given I read a lot - much of it not on paper - or it could have been Wired lost its focus trying to figure out whether it wanted to be a tech magazine or a business magazine or both or neither. In any event, I got lured back to Wired by a ultra-low subscription offer (those $2 a month deals that used to be mysteriously unavailable to Canadians) so I'm back in the fold. For me, the high-tech magazine comeback will really be complete when freelance writing assignments start to materialize again. During the boom, editors were wonderfully desperate for content because they needed something to fill those annoying gaps between advertisements!