After finally finishing this month's Wired — you know, the one with Julia Allison on the cover — we noticed there was an ad for a Sony laptop in place of the usual "Found: Artifacts From The Future" back page.

Curious, we emailed the magazine's deputy editor, Thomas Goetz, to learn the fate of the six-year staple:

We have decided to retire the page (it has been, I'd note, one of the rare successes in the notoriously difficult game of magazine backpages). But despite the blogospeculation, we have not forsaken Found for an advertising spot. Instead, we are cooking up something very cool and very original for our *new* backpage feature, a new twist on the form that we think will engage and entertain our readers as much as Found has. It will be edited by [senior editor] Chris Baker, who also was the visionary behind Found these past several years. Readers should look for it in our October issue.

We thought the Sony ad bore an eerily resemblance to the look and feel of the usual Found page, so we asked Goetz about that as well:

Any Found similarity is coincidence (though advertisers do routinely look to Wired's NMA-winning design for inspiration, that's purely a one-way street). The new back page will appear in that same spot, month after month.

We wouldn't blame an ad agency for aping Wired's style either, but just for kicks, after the jump we let you compare the two back pages.

Found from July, 2008:

Last month's Sony ad: