A quarter of the 50-something employees in Wired.com's San Francisco newsroom are gone, a source tells us — and with them, the bubbly delusion that Wired would not just report on the transformation of media by technology, but be a part of the revolution as well. The cuts hit Wired's tech team heavily, though some writers and editors also got pink slips. (CNET reports that 3 out of 28 editorial staffers are gone, but a Wired insider says that the actual number of edit jobs cut is at least six.)Also gone: Kourosh Karimkhany, the VP of corporate development for Wired.com's parent company, CondéNet. (The magazine is run separately by Condé Nast, a sister company to CondéNet.) Karimkhany did the deals to buy Reddit, an online news-discussion site; Ars Technica, a rival tech blog; and Webmonkey, a Web-technology how-to site. With no further deals planned, there wasn't much reason to keep him on, we hear. (Photo by Jackson West)

Conde Nast has laid off dozens of people today from CondeNet, the company's internet division. We hear from one source that 60 people were let go this morning, most in tech, some in marketing. We also hear that an additional 20 staffers were fired from "Conde Connect," the company's internal intranet division. Conde itself hasn't released specific numbers, but these are part of the 5% across-the-board cuts the company ordered two weeks ago. If you have info, email us.

At a party thrown by Wired in June, I teased Wired.com editor-in-chief Evan Hansen for eschewing the online publication's mid-1990s bravado in favor of his just-a-journalist aw-shucks routine. I fear the man has taken my jibes seriously, to his employer's peril. He is talking up Wired as a software developer, competing with Google, and thinking about the launch of a sports blog. Remember Adrenaline? Exactly. Neither does Hansen, or anyone else at Wired, the magazine which spawned the ill-fated sports website, which shuttered shortly after Wired Ventures' failed attempt to go public.Hansen shows that Wired is reprising all of its mistakes from the last bubble. "Our vision is to not just be a magazine publisher covering technology, but to be a developer of these things," he says. Of a photo-gallery tool for the website, he says: "We’re hoping to have something to show that will blow people’s minds." Has he been eating Wired founder Louis Rossetto's chocolate? If I sound like a grumpy old fellow who's seen this all before, it's because I have, first-hand. The sports venture isn't the only repetitive pattern I've spotted. In 1996, Wired bought Suck.com, giving the cultural-critique website enough of a budget to hire unskilled 24-year-olds as copy boys. In 2006, Wired bought Reddit, which lets anyone build their own version of Suck.com (except not as good, because none of Reddit's users are as funny as Joey Anuff, Carl Steadman, or Ana Marie Cox). What's different now? Oh, sure, we can talk about Internet adoption, broadband, open-source software. Whatever. What has really changed is that now, instead of public shareholders funding Wired's wild experiments, advertisers are willing to foot the bill. And that is perhaps the biggest reason for Hansen's newfound enthusiasm. He's looking forward to putting ads for sugary electrolyte drinks on his new sports blog. Which only makes us think of OK Soda.

Sarah Chubb is not just the president of CondeNet, the online division of Conde Nast—she's also a "nationally ranked cyclist." And she's damn tired of you plodding runners hating on her cycling style in the wild streets of Central Park, for real! "There is a lot of hate," she tells New York mag. "The Road Runners club can take over the entire park, and they get pissed at us if our races go past 8 a.m. The runners don't stay where they're supposed to stay, they're wearing headphones, and they'll scream at you if you ask them to get out of the way!" Fools. If you think that CondeNet president Sarah Chubb will hesitate to run you over at high speed, well, you don't know anything about making it in the media. [NY Mag. Pic via NYO]

At a party Wired threw for its Reddit social news site tonight, to celebrate the release of its software as open source, I pressed Wired News editor Evan Hansen for details on HotWired, the tired Web brand his corporate overseers at Conde Nast are planning to revive. He didn't tell me anything — except that the social network Wired editor Chris Anderson has been talking about is not, in fact, HotWired. Correction appreciated, Evan. HotWired, whatever it is, is far enough along to be part of Wired's PR boilerplate. A press release for Wired property Reddit included this phrase: "HotWired's development is TBD." To be determined. That's the point at which I became bored.

TechCrunch reports that CondeNet, the online arm of Condé Nast and the parent of Wired.com, has bought Ars Technica, a rival technology news site. But if the latest issue of Wired is any indication, that's not the only tech property that's moved to CondeNet recently. On page 24, Wired's June issue announces a new version of Webmonkey, a defunct site for Web developers, under a list of Wired.com features:

In a surprising move for the sluggish CondeNet (Wired, a brand founded on the Internet's future, has just gotten around to hosting video on its website), Conde Nast is partnering with YouTube to distribute videos from its media empire — and getting a slice of the advertising revenue.