Eight years ago, Condé Nast bought Wired Magazine (print) and Lycos bought Wired Digital. Now, Condé Nast is fulfilling a longtime goal of uniting the two publications with its purchase of Wired News from Lycos for $25 million. Lycos isn't selling Hotbot, Hotwired and Webmonkey, but today's deal includes all of Wired News assets -- website, news content and domain name.

About a year ago Wired News laid off all staff writers when it cut its work force by half. Since then Wired News has relied on freelance writers.

Condé Nast said it would retain Wired News staff according Daum Communications of Korea, Lycos' parent company. CondéNet, Condé Nast Publications' web division, will operate Wired News assets.

Writing in Wired today, Leander Kahney argues that Apple's stores are key to the company's success. "The stores are as important to Apple as the iPod or OS X when it comes to driving the public's extraordinary interest in the resurgent company -- though it's hard to say which is more important, because they're interrelated." As Leander notes, Apple says its stores are now making more than $1 billion in sales per quarter, and the company's 136 stores now account for about 17% of its total revenue.

Part of the attraction is simply the design of the stores, and indeed, Apple was one of five companies that won a Hot Retailer Award last year from ICSC (International Council of Shopping Centers), which polled 3,126 mall managers and marketing directors in the U.S. and Canada. Looking forward, Apple has said it will open 40 stores in 2006. Two factors that I would keep in mind: rising commercial rents and the fickle nature of consumers. For instance, the Apple store in downtown Soho may be a gem, but I wonder how the design will look in, say, five years -- will it be outdated? And how much re-design does Apple plan to do on its stores? (Full disclosure: I have freelanced for ICSC).

[Photo of Apple store in Chicago io_burn]

Was it when Steve Jobs announced that smaller, more portable laptops would never be popular among consumers, later to go all mini, all the time with the iBook? Or, when Apple finally let its consumers have more than one clicker on their mouse, despite a decade of insistence that one was the loveliest number? Which is your favorite of Apple's many marketing flip-flops?

Wired has a highly entertaining (and not a little enlightening) trip through what they call the "belly dance" moves Apple has made over the years. Number One: when Jobs announced that Intel's processor would be the wave of the future, contrary to his insistence, in November 2003, that the PowerPC would never die.