Nerd-Craft Job Post: MAKE Magazine

Wow. This is an awesome opportunity from a publication we love: MAKE magazine.

Here's the squishy:

Extraordinary Publishing Group Seeks Extraordinary Online Manager
Quick, name an upstart magazine team that's been featured on CBS News, The Colbert Report, Jimmy Kimmel Live, CNN, NBC and PBS. One that's been covered by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Newsweek, Wired and virtually every major daily and online blog in its first 36 months. Whose two DIY magazines won back-to-back awards for the best new magazine launch. Whose websites attract more than 3 million visitors/month and whose Weekend Projects video is one of the top-rated tech podcasts anywhere. Name a magazine team who two years ago introduced what has already become the the largest Do-It-Yourself (DIY) event on the planet. And who last year shipped thousands of DIY kits, tools and books to makers, teachers and students around the world.

If you answered O'Reilly's Maker Media group, you'd be right. In just three years, our small but motivated team has launched Make: magazine, Craft: magazine, makezine.com, craftzine.com, Maker Faire, a line of DIY books, and The Maker Store. But now, we're looking for yet another truly unique individual to join the Maker Media family in the capacity of our new Online Manager.

This is a hands-on position on a hands-on team requiring a combination of management, design, and coding skills. You need to be able to come out of one of our roundtable brainstorms, synthesize new ideas from a mix of editorial, design, brand and marketing stake holders, and then transform your ideas into reality. You will manage projects and day-to-day operations, and implement code and content for the Maker Media sites including Makezine.com, Craftzine.com, MakerFaire.com, Hackszine.com, and a few other cool ideas we're working on.

Must be able to work closely with O'Reilly's IS staff and outside vendors to ensure that features and tools are implemented properly. The online manager needs to be a self-motivated, detail-oriented individual with exceptional project management skills. At the same time, we really don't care a lot about charts and tools you learned in school, but we do want to know that you can define the tasks and organize and manage resources to get it all done.

To Geek or not to Geek: Geek Craft

Ever tried knitting on a bus? Or in a bar? Well we did both recently and were met with raised eyebrows. Made us, and our date, feel a little geeky, but we forgot that to some football fans, crafting is something strange and unusual. Somehow these folks didn't get the memo that crafting periodically makes these leaps into the limelight of trendiness. Rather than explain it though, we sat quietly, knit, and as usual pondered.

Craft becomes a cultural fixation when posed in front of the backdrop of increasingly fast-paced, technological environments. See William Morris, and Arts & Crafts movement. And while crafting may be seen as a sort of rejection of the modern world, it can also be an awesome place to riff on modern technologies. See Make.

Lately though, this techno crafting has fallen into the dimmly defined category of "geek craft."

A couple of weeks ago Geek Sugar, one of the many facets of the Sugar empire, posted this poll to vote for the best geek craft of 2007. Oddly they only came up with six crafts, and of those five were video game related. Geek Sugar has obviously picked up on a craft trend here. Hey, even Martha Stewart made a Wii cake for the cover of Wired.

Yesterday the Globe and Mail in Canada published this article about Geek Craft, that while sort of typical in it's whole shocked-and-awed approach to geek craft, features a brief interview with Kimberly Chapman, a self proclaimed nerd.

"A significant amount of the joy I derive from my nerdy crafts is to be the first to present these juxtapositions to the world," [Kimberly Chapman] says.

She realizes her hobby may seem a bit odd to outsiders, and she's fine with that. Most people, Ms. Chapman notes, "don't watch a puppet show and mentally take apart the stitching to imagine how the puppet was made...They don't look at a structure and wonder what it would take to make a cake version.

"Nerds do those things. Nerds can't stop asking questions and mentally disassembling the world around them. Nerds wonder, and wonder is at the heart of creativity."

Read the whole article if you are interested, but nerd or not, Chapman sounds like a just another crafter who protects her patterns and likes to look at the world from 'how could I do that myself' perspective. Who wouldn't want to have their Wii and eat it too?