Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

Martha Gets Wired

BoomTown has long been a big fan of Martha Stewart.

And we like her 25% more now, after seeing the new pictures she took for Wired’s latest issue, as well as a particularly sassy interview she did with the magazine.

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The homemaking empress is on the cover of Wired, pictured here making a Wii-shaped cake. It looks delicious, but apparently is not from these recipe instructions that leave out the baking soda for architectural reasons.

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And another picture here by Jill Greenberg has her pruning a robot hedge, along with this interview with Mark Frauenfelder on her gadget-freak status.

That’s been easy to see for many years. I ran into her first more than a decade ago at a Microsoft party at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and she has shown up at a variety of Silicon Valley events from time to time.

In addition, Stewart has attended the D conference for the past two years, first accompanying Martha Stewart Omnimedia CEO Susan Lyne, who appeared onstage at D4. But I was surprised to observe that she has actually been one of the few attendees who has sat through all of the sessions from start to finish.

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She even managed to fire off a very funny but pointed series of questions at D4 to Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer about the nest of wires current gadgets require to operate. Here she is pictured grilling Stringer and also showing one of D‘s teen panelists how to properly fold a T-shirt.

In the current interview with Wired, Stewart makes some other salient points, especially about quality. “Whether you’re a programmer or a seamstress, it’s all about new techniques, simplifying old techniques and consolidating steps,” she said. “Making things go faster–but not worse. Better.”

She also jokingly blames the end of her marriage on the Walkman, which she calls the “Rudeman,” and decries using email over talking, although she seems pretty addicted to her BlackBerry from what I have seen (to be fair, so am I).

And Stewart is also apparently working on “Marthapedia,” which is her take on the user-contributed Wikipedia project. Of course, it being Martha, she will be editing user content.

“It won’t be as freewheeling as Wikipedia,” she said. “Because a lot of this–you have to really monitor it.”

And that is a good thing.

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