Boston Globe on Make and ReadyMade

Leighton Klein wrote a great piece about Make and ReadyMade magazines in today's Boston Globe.

"Most technology magazines are platform oriented -- here's a PC or a Mac -- or they're product oriented -- this is what you can do with a certain program," says Dougherty, 50. "There wasn't anything that looked across all the things that we own and use and trying to put them together."

That thought led to Dougherty's getting the green light in 2004 from his employer, O'Reilly Media of Sebastopol, Calif., to create what would become Make. The company, founded in Cambridge in 1984, started as a technical-writing company but soon moved into publishing. That one of their popular titles is ''PC Annoyances" goes a long way toward illustrating their practical yet irreverent approach. Nothing is sacred and no hand too powerful to be given a nice swift chomp should it deserve it. In short, a good place to start a magazine like Make.

Some of the magazine's charms include its chunky build (based on Popular Science's 1959 trim size) and broad view of what constitutes technology. It can be an ancient water filter in Nicaragua carved from porous volcanic rock, a shoulder bag made from the remains of a discarded wetsuit, or -- what the heck -- an entire PC gaming system jammed inside the case of a defunct Atari. As with ReadyMade, function trumps perfection every time, and humor is a big part of the equation. "Perform an alien mouse autopsy" is step two for building the robot computer mouse, for example.

Link