Gawker: valleywag, book review

Guy Kawasaki's new book — an excerpt from the foreword

Paul Boutin — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 13:40:59 EDT

Yesterday, as Web 2.0's bubble burst in slow motion at 30,000 feet over downtown San Francisco, I received a preview copy of Reality Check, by Guy Kawasaki. Someone had stuck a Post-it on the cover: "See inside for foreword by The Fake Steve Jobs!" Awesome. I'm never going to read Kawasaki's book, even though he's way more successful than I'll ever be. I skipped to Dan Lyons's foreword, written in his Fake Steve persona. Here's the best parts:

So what is Guy's new book about? To be honest, I have no idea. I didn't read it. I didn't even pretend to read it. Guy is craven enough that he doesn't really care whether I read his book or not. As he put it to me, all he wants is a famous name to put on the cover, and pretty much everyone turned him down and so he had to resort to calling me, and so, fine.

So this is it — my official endorsement. Reality Check is by far the best book ever written about the Valley. It's an important and necessary work, one that should be required reading in every business school in the country. I wish this book had been around when I was starting Apple in my garage back in 1976.

There's a really super-important lesson, yet one that so many people overlook, especially here in the Valley. Anyway, if these incredibly super-obvious things aren't already super-obvious to you, then you probably need to read a book like this and have someone like Guy Kawasaki teach you how to start a business in terms that a child could understand.

Namaste, poorly informed wannabe business people. I honor the place where your imbecilic gaze and my incredlibly wise words become one. Much love. Peace out.

Neal Stephenson's Internet-free bliss

Paul Boutin — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 11:00:00 EDT

What do science-fiction/science-history meganovel writer Neal Stephenson and Internet crank Nick Carr have in common? They both postulate that our society's glut of video and network access trains people not to sit down and learn how to think for themselves — why figure anything out if you can just Google up an answer? (Case in point: The stock-research guy who Googled a 2002 story about United's bankruptcy and wrote it up as if it were news.) Stephenson's Anathem, which takes place in a world where grownups actually do math, is available in bookstores Tuesday. You can read my Wall Street Journal review, or — heh — just watch this video.

I didn't know they make trailers for books now. "The World of Anathem" is by Seattle videographer Brady Hall, who I'm told makes a decent living from the genre.

"The Facebook Book" was totally worth the lunch hour I spent reading it

Nicholas Carlson — Tue, 27 May 2008 17:00:00 EDT

Valleywag commenter Fidel on the Roof likes to call Facebook "Fadbook." Harvard graduates Greg Atwan and Evan Lushing, authors of the Facebook Book: a Satirical Companion beg to agree. But Atwan and Lushing might disagree with Fidel on the scale of said fad. "Facebook is huge," they write.

How huge is huge? Facebook is Justin Timberlake performs at your high school big. The iPod's share of the MP3-player market big. The Dalai Lama's preeminence over other lamas big.

Atwan and Lushing would say Facebook is a fad in the sense that Friends was a fad in 1990s. Except bigger. More like guitar-based Rock 'n Roll was a fad in the mid-20th century. Or pants, starting sometime in the 15th. Facebook is so big it's a new culture, and therefore deserving of it's own book. It's certainly worth flipping through a copy at the bookstore and admiring Aurora Andrews' illustrations.

Us? We'd rather read a book about the struggle to create a Facebook business model or a tale of the company's beginning, full of insider dish. We want to know: who was Jessica Alona and what'd she do to Zuckerberg that made him so angry he had to distract himself by creating Facebook? While it contains no such secret it does present a humorously satirical look at the impact of Facebook on the cultural landscape. See for yourself in the excerpted "Facebook Index" embedded below. Click to expand the image.