Together the essays in The Best of Technology Writing 2007 capture the versatility and verve of technology writing today. Solicited through an open online nominating process, these pieces explore a wide range of intriguing topics---from "crowdsourcing" to the online habits of urban moms to the digital future of movie production.

The Best of Technology Writing 2007 will appeal to anyone who enjoys stellar writing.

Introduction by Steven Levy

Not long ago, in one of my periodic cleaning binges, I came across a steno notebook dated “1984 Northwest.” The pen scratches within provide a record of my journey to Seattle and environs in the middle part of that year, now (gulp) over two decades past. It was illuminating, and a little jarring for me, to recollect the impetus of that trip, what I found, and especially how I went about collecting information.

In those distant days (9,000 years ago in Internet time), I was writing a column for a magazine, now long buried, called Popular Computing. Unlike our sister publication, Byte, which was the unofficial geek bible (published monthly, at a bulk that made Vogue look pencil thin), PopCo attempted to reach a less technical audience who had recently stepped into the world of personal computers and software and were both fascinated and a bit dazed as a result. In those days, of course, anyone without an MIT degree who routinely used a computer—be it an IBM PC, an Apple II, or a Kaypro—was viewed as an adventurer in a strange realm. Simply using a word processor was a sort of desktop X-game event.

At one point our magazine ran a story profiling women who used personal computers—not Silicon Valley executives, not IT consultants, not female programmers, just those then-rare creatures who had mastered the command line without benefit of Y chromosomes. (I am not making this up.) Our crew at Popular Computing was supposed to demystify this brave new world by providing sound advice about how to buy and operate these wonderful but often confounding new machines.

We also strived to recount some of the stories and reveal a bit of the sociology behind this new phenomenon. The latter was the point of my column, which ran every month at about 2,500 words, a length exceeding the average cover story of my current employer, Newsweek. ...

Steven Levy is a Senior Editor at Newsweek, where he writes the biweekly column "The Technologist." One of the most acclaimed and versatile technology writers in the country, Levy has written six books, including The Perfect Thing (about Apple's iPod) and Hackers, which PC Magazine's readers voted the best sci-tech book written in the last twenty years. He has written for many publications, including the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Wired.

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The year's best writing on tech: a collection as imaginative and compelling as its dynamic subject.

About the Contributors:

Kevin Berger is the features editor at Salon.

Paul Boutin is a writer and editor who lives in San Francisco. He wrote “You Are What You Search” while working as a technical writer for search software maker Splunk. He is currently Wired’s managing editor for blogs.

Kiera Butler envies those who have made sorting through CD bins into a career, but she likes writing, too. Her work has appeared in Columbia Journalism Review, Utne Reader, and OnEarth Magazine, among other publications. She currently works as an associate editor at Plenty magazine.

When he’s not tracking down interesting science and technology stories (“Say Hello to Stanley”), Wired contributing editor Joshua Davis spends his free time competing in the world’s wildest competitions. It began when he entered the U.S. Armwrestling Nationals, where he lost every single match but ended up fourth (out of four) in the lightweight division. That earned him a spot on Team USA and sent him to Poland for the World Armwrestling Championships. The Underdog, his book about becoming an internationally ranked arm wrestler (as well as a sumo wrestler, matador, and backward runner), is now available from Random House. More info can be found at http://www.joshuadavis.net/.

Julian Dibbell has, in the course of over a decade of writing and publishing, established himself as one of digital culture’s most thoughtful and accessible observers. He is the author of two books about online worlds—Play Money: Or How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot (Basic, 2006) and My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World (Henry Holt, 1999)—and has written essays and articles on hackers; computer viruses; online communities; encryption technologies; music pirates; and the heady cultural, political, and philosophical questions that tie these and other digital-age phenomena together. He lives in South Bend, Indiana.

Matt Gaffney’s crossword puzzles have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, Billboard, and the Onion. His writing on puzzles and games has appeared in the Washington Post, Slate, and the Weekly Standard. He is the author of Gridlock: Crossword Puzzles and the Mad Geniuses Who Create Them and The Idiot’s Guide to Solving Crossword Puzzles and Other Word Games.

Lori Gottlieb is a commentator for National Public Radio and has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Time, People, Elle, Glamour, and the I, among many other publications. She is the author of the national best seller Stick Figure: A Diary of My Former Self and coauthor of Inside the Cult of Kibu: And Other Tales of the Millennial Gold Rush and I Love You, Nice to Meet You.

John Gruber writes and publishes Daring Fireball, a somewhat popular, strongly opinionated Weblog for Mac, Web, and user interface design nerds. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and son.

Jeff Howe is a contributing editor at Wired Magazine, where he covers the entertainment industry, among other subjects. He is currently writing a book about crowdsourcing, a term he coined in his June 2006 Wired article. Before coming to Wired he was a senior editor at Inside.com and a writer at the Village Voice. In his 15 years as a journalist he has traveled around the world working on stories ranging from the impending water crisis in Central Asia to the implications of gene patenting. He has written for Time Magazine, U.S. News & World Report, the Washington Post, Mother Jones, and numerous other publications. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Alysia Abbott; their daughter, Annabel Rose; and a miniature black Lab named Clementine.

Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired Magazine and author of Out of Control and New Rules for the New Economy. He is publisher of the popular Web sites Cool Tools and True Films and is on the board of the Long Now Foundation, which is building a 10,000-year clock.

Jaron Lanier is Interdisciplinary Scholar-in-Residence, Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology, University of California, Berkeley, and Scholar at Large, Live Labs, Microsoft Corporation. Lanier’s interests include biomimetic information architectures, user interfaces, heterogeneous scientific simulations, advanced information systems for medicine, and computational approaches to the fundamentals of physics.

Preston Lerner is a contributing editor at Popular Science and a contributing writer at Automobile Magazine. He has written about technology (and other subjects) for the New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Wired, Smithsonian, and Air & Space.

Steven Levy is a Senior News Editor at Newsweek where he writes the biweekly column "The Technologist." One of the most acclaimed and versatile technology writers in the country, Levy has written six books, including The Perfect Thing (about Apple's iPod) and Hackers, which PC Magazine's readers voted the best sci-tech book written in the last twenty years. He has written for many publications, including the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and Wired.

Farhad Manjoo is writing a book about how the Web, cable news, and talk radio contribute to a fragmented culture in which people indulge their own beliefs in favor of the truth. He is also a frequent contributor to Salon.

Justin McElroy is a journalist living with his wife, Sydnee, along the Ohio River in West Virginia. During the day, he’s a mild-mannered newspaper reporter. But in the evenings (and on the occasional weekend) he has found the time to contribute to gaming publications such as the Escapist, Joystiq, Computer Games Magazine, Gamezebo, and Gamers with Jobs: Press Pass.

Ben McGrath is a staff writer at the New Yorker. He lives in Manhattan.

Katharine Mieszkowski is a senior writer for Salon.com, where she covers technology, health, and the environment. Her writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, Glamour, and the Los Angeles Times. Her commentaries have been featured on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and Public Radio International’s Living on Earth. Katharine still hasn’t spent the pennies she earned on Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Emily Nussbaum is an editor-at-large at New York Magazine. She lives in New York and writes frequently about pop culture and technology.

Jeffrey M. O’Brien is a senior editor at Fortune, covering the intersection of science, technology, culture, and business. He was a 2006 Templeton-Cambridge fellow in science and religion at the University of Cambridge.

Larry O’Brien is a software development consultant and contributing editor to SD Times. A well-known writer on software development topics, he blogs at http://www.knowing.net.

The Onion, based in New York City, began as a student publication at the University of Wisconsin in 1988 and has since grown into America’s preeminent satirical publication and what the New Yorker has called “arguably the most popular humor periodical in world history.”

Adam L. Penenberg is a journalism professor at New York University and assistant director of the Business and Economic Reporting Program. In 1998, while a staff editor at Forbes.com, he garnered national attention for unmasking Stephen Glass as a fabulist, as portrayed in the 2003 film Shattered Glass (Steve Zahn plays Penenberg). His first book, Spooked: Espionage in Corporate America (Perseus Books, 2000), was excerpted in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, and his second, Tragic Indifference: One Man’s Battle with the Auto Industry over the Dangers of SUVs (HarperBusiness, 2003), was optioned for the movies by Michael Douglas. A former columnist for Slate and Wired News, Adam is currently a contributing writer for Fast Company magazine.

John Seabrook has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1993. Prior to that, he was a staff writer at Vanity Fair. His work has also appeared in Harpers, Vogue, the Nation, and many other publications. He is the author of two books, Deeper: My Two-Year Odyssey in Cyberspace and Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture. A collection of his articles, entitled Flash of Genius, will appear in 2008. He lives in New York City with his wife and son.

Philip Smith has enjoyed writing all of his life. In 1994, he started writing and moderating for FireFly—one of the first social networking sites on the Internet, similar to today’s MySpace and FaceBook sites. In 1999, Smith started journaling on Slashdot. In 2002, he carried his writings to his own Web site, which eventually became his current blog on Blogger. In 2005, Smith’s blog was listed in the Blog 100 by CNET.

Aaron Swartz is a writer, hacker, and activist from Cambridge, Massachusetts. He cofounded reddit.com, codeveloped the Markdown format, and coauthored the RSS 1.0 spec.

Clive Thompson writes about technology and culture for the New York Times Magazine, Wired, New York Magazine, and other publications. He also runs the tech-culture blog collisiondetection.net.

Jeffrey R. Young is a writer and editor for the Chronicle of Higher Education. After covering technology for the newspaper for more than 10 years, he recently began focusing on producing video and audio features for the Web. His freelance work has appeared in the New York Times and other publications.

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