The most annoying thing about TweetBookz isn't that it's spelled with a Z (which is pretty annoying and should be reserved for Liza), but that it has lowered the bar for the already suspect phenomenon of giving people an analog medium for their digital brilliance. But at least the publishing world does us the favor of finding the best of the bunch to give annoying Twitter-based books. Just like companies that will self-publish anyone's crumby novel for a service fee, now any 14-year-old girl (or the parents of any 14 year-old who think their kid is the Confucius of microblogging) with a keyboard and/or a smart phone can enter the realm of publishing. This is going to be the first thing I write about on @StuffIHate.

TweetBookz only charges $30 for a hardcover and $20 and it is comprised of as few as 40 pages with one tweet on each page or as many as 200 tweets. That's only 10 cents a tweet, which means that is now official market value for these internet outbursts. Thanks, TweetBookz, for placing an amount on them. Now to get a $10,000 advance for the @StuffIHate Twitter book, we're going to have to write write 100,000 dispatches. That's way too much work!

Heavens knows what they would think if Stewart just transmitted their intimate off-camera comments to the entire world. The likes of Snoop Dogg might not trust her with their deepest secrets anymore. No, better to keep the Martha Stewart Twitter an occult bible of hellish fire pits opening on the surface of the Earth. Douglas can keep hawking TwitterWit, his printed collection of amusing tweets; Stewart seems more likely to buy — or publish — something along the lines of TwitterWoe.

Contributors to the book, edited by the former Valleywag editor and Gawker blogger (pictured), received a "congratulations" email today (below) from a HarperCollins marketer, which suggested they "flood Twitter with so many tweets about the book that no self-respecting Twitter addict will be able to resist buying a copy." Attached was a link to an "online buzz kit" consisting of various graphical badges (see image at left).

Bizarrely, this seems to be working (see image below), even though contributors get no royalties from the book, just a free copy. Flattery might have something to do with, as might ambition: Remember that Facebook status update that might turn into a movie? Surely the Twitter crowd is smart enough to draw some deals like that. Writes Douglas,

If even one [contributor] gets noticed enough to get their own book deal, I'll feel supremely lucky... Some of the people in the book are working on TV pilots, movies, books... mostly independently of their tweets. But the user @arjunbasu, who writes all these self-contained stories on Twitter, is looking to do that in particular in a book.

There you go: HarperCollins' campaign is about empowerment, not exploitation. Remember that as you gratefully flood Twitter with promotional messages. Also: It's always been this way.

(Top pic: Douglas, by Cameron Walters)

For benefit of the uninitiated, 4chan is a popular Wild West-ish outpost of internet known equally for its infamous hacking jobs and pranks (Rickrolling emerged from this murky swamp) as its meme generation, perhaps most notably the LOLcats phenomenon. 4chan's /b/ messageboard, one of the sections of the site blocked by AT&T, was once described as "the asshole of the internet" by Gawker and Valleywag alum Nick Douglas, an outpost where "btards" gather to engage in tasteless games of uncensored oneupsmanship, where the objective is often to see who can elicit the most shock from other members of the community.

Reports Tech Central:

Users of AT&T's DSL internet access across many states in the US are reporting that they are being blocked from the infamous /b/ message board in what appears to be an act of internet censorship by the phone company. This started today Sunday and no one has yet been able to get any official confirmation out of AT&T as to why.

Moot, the founder of 4chan, has confirmed AT&T is filtering/blocking the site.

In addition to starting a war with the internet's most skilled collection of cyber-rogues, Central Gadget says that AT&T may also be breaking the law.

Under the FCC's Comcast/BitTorrent ruling, Internet Service Providers may only slow or cap connection speeds. They are not allowed to block any service or protocol on the internet. Here, 4chan as a web site appears to fall under an internet service, but it is also conforming to standard web page protocols. It appears AT&T does not have the legal right to block 4chan, only to cap customers who are "abusing" their access to the internet.

Predictably, the 4chan crowd is already mobilizing both inside and outside of their online community. AT&T didn't just open a can worms, they dove headfirst into a den of vipers, and this will be very interesting to watch play out.

AT&T Takes on 4chan—Everybody Stand Back [Tech Central]
AT&T Blocking Access to Some Parts of 4chan [Central Gadget]
pic via

According to a press release from his publisher, reprinted below, Pogue's book now has a publication date of August 12, nearly a full month ahead of Douglas' book (Sept. 8), despite the writer's late start.

Douglas was mostly polite about the competition in an email conversation — "I'm sure both his book and mine will do well," yadda yadda — but we did manage to elicit one underminey quote:

I'm impressed with how quickly Pogue and his publisher turned out their book, since I started working on mine last fall and only just this week approved the absolute final draft. I'm pretty thankful for the long process.



With less time, I couldn't have gotten contributions from Jimmy Fallon, Ashton Kutcher, Susan Orlean, Eugene Mirman, Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter, or Sarah Silverman.

Zing! (In fairness, we'll be happy to print a reply from Pogue. Feel free to go way over 140 characters, David!)

Though Douglas may have the big names, Pogue has a decided PR advantage. The high-profile columnist and TV commentator has a head start, and thus a pretty good shot at sucking up all the available press for a book of witty tweets. He's also got claim to calling his book the first of its kind, as he does in the press release below.

Now Douglas' publisher HarperCollins has to scramble to catch up. An old-line publishing house moving at Twitter speeds? Stranger things have happened.

The Daily Show's Rob Corddry owned his creepiness.

The SFAppeal's Eve Batey rose above petty jealousy.

Amazon.com mailed former Observer hand Doree Shafrir a thinly-veiled serenity test.

The Daily Show's Miles Kahn was determined to make the Iran situation somehow funny.

Vice's Nick Douglas found inspiration in the DirecTV program guide.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets - or send us more Twitter usernames.

Six Apart's Anil Dash made a joke for people who remember 1986.

Tech writer Glenn Fleischman seemed to enjoy his heroic service in the peanut gallery.

Professional Twitter compiler Nick Douglas immediately grasped the real-world implications of Apple's shiny new toy.

Engadget's Joshua Topolsky made us wish we were more up to speed on Gawker Media gossip.

Xeni Jardin had a surreal CNN experience not involving Lou Dobbs or Anderson Cooper.

Jake Tapper engaged in passive-aggressive tweeting.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets - or send us more Twitter usernames.

Watch as microcelebrity NBC contractor Rex Sorgatz attempts to explain Foursquare, a friend-finding interactive game launched by former Google employee Dennis Crowley at the South By Southwest event, an annual excuse for a nonstop party thinly disguised as a conference on all things Web. Carr may be perplexed, but he comes to the right conclusion: Foursquare is a toy for "kids on the Internets."

"Internets," plural! Carr's cool like that!

Sorgatz and Crowley are just two of the familiar microcelebrities who make cameo appearances in Carr's writeup of SXSW. There's Tumblr founder David Karp, bragging about being a slacker:

I didn't even come last year, but this year we dropped the whole team in, I guess as a way of saying that we mean business. We're mostly having fun, doing a few meetings and enjoying seeing old friends. It would probably be a better use of my time to be back home staying up till 4 in the morning and just crushing it to come up with one more application, but this is more fun.

Declaring how much fun one is having and how much work one is avoiding is a strange way of showing one means business, but that's Karp for you.

And look, two Valleywag alumni:

All this can become insular, and fast. On Monday Nick Douglas and Melissa Gira Grant, two veteran bloggers, hosted a session called the "Sex Lives of the Microfamous." The two were involved once, and broke up on Tumblr, or so the story goes.

Actually, I could have sworn those two crazy kids broke up on Valleywag, but what do I know? I'm not quite as old as Carr, but I'm old enough to view faddish kiddie startups like Tumblr and Foursquare with skepticism.

(Video by Richard Blakeley)

Still, if we'd known repurposing other people's content, whether on Twitter, Tumblr, Tumblr or Tumblr, was a fast track to literally tens of thousands of dollars in publishing money, we'd have jumped on that trend sooner.

As opposed to what we're doing now, which is, uh, totally different.

(Top pic via Nick Douglas)

Take last night, for example. The conference's official happy hour was packed, while the cocktail party hosted by Break Media, CollegeHumor, and other panelists from the "Comedy on Television and the Web" panel was far more relaxed. Attendees included CollegeHumor's Ricky Van Veen and The Office's BJ Novak. In between buying dozens of Kamikaze shots, Break Media CEO Keith Richman complimented Mahalo's Jason Calacanis's poker game. (Calacanis is a noted gambler, so much so that we sometimes wonder if he might have a problem.)

Break Media CEO Keith Richman, former Valleywag editor Nick Douglas, and New York writer and comedienne Caroline Waxler

We arrived at Digg's Second Annual Big Digg Shindig at Stubb's BBQ too late to see the live Diggnation taping — though we hear it was packed shoulder to shoulder — but just in time to see fanboys mob Diggnation host Kevin Rose and dispensable sidekick Alex Albrecht for autographs en masse.





NY Tech Meetup organizer, proven wantrepreneur, and host of The Interwebs Nate Westheimer

iLike's Ali Partovi and Hype Machine's Anthony Volodkin

Valleywag alumna and Boffery cofounder Melissa Gira Grant with Automattic's Matt Mullenweg

After a stop at an impromptu Next New Networks party, we headed to the Driskill Hotel. Microcelebrity egoblogger Julia Allison was flanked by fans who showed up after she sent a message on Twitter seeking reassurance of her self-importance. She has actual fans! Three of them!

Time's Karen Tumulty and Rachel Maddow buddy Ana Marie Cox were fascinated by the funny ways foreigners speak.

Music critic Touré applauded John Mayer's effort to monetize Twitter in ways that Obama's latest, disastrous economic advisor would never dare.

Money was also on the mind of Gawker alum Nick Douglas as he learned that collecting a book of funny tweets does not solve money problems as quickly as one would like.

The Politico's gossip reporter Patrick Gavin opined that todays poors are living on easy street.

Former celebrity magazine editor Bonnie Fuller revealed herself as the only person in the world who believes Madonna hasn't had some work done.

See something worth noting on Twitter? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

Because it sounds somehow even lazier than making a book out of your mom's email messages, a scheme hatched up, perhaps not coincidentally, by another Gawker writer.

Douglas insists the work is backbreaking — "reading a thousand jokes is like watching five hours of porn" — but he's already automated the process of collecting submissions and permissions. Those who make it into the book get no royalties, but a free copy of the work ensures they at least won't have to pay to see their own content in printed format.

So we've seen blog books, internet cat-picture books, a family email book and now the first book collection of tweets. Remember when the internet was the desperate medium, and had to steal its content from the incumbent players, rather than everything working the other way around? Those sure were the days.

There's a simple algorithm for making up new Twitter words: Take an existing word and defile it by changing the initial consonant to "tw." Here are just a few examples:

• Twirting. Flirting on Twitter, an activity popularized by former Valleywag editor Nick Douglas.
• Tweeps. Twitter peeps, or friends. Seemingly intelligent people like Air America radio hostess Ana Marie Cox use this in an apparently unironic manner.
• Twisticuffs. A fight between Twitter users.

It just gets worse from there. But the single most horrible Twitter word is surely "twebinar," which is a Web seminar — "webinar" — conducted over Twitter. Twanks, but no twanks.

(Photoillustration via Maximum PC)

Sure, it's just a bunch of disgruntled kids at legendary San Francisco after-work bar House of Shields slinging tech slang and calling into question the reductionism ideal for deal making in the Valley. But few of the ideas presented at interface designer Eris Stassi and author Paul Carr's hastily assembled "Smack My Pitch Up" were so farfetched as to be unbelievable. In the poorly-shot video above, the three finalists join Calacanis Cup winner and founding Valleywag editor Nick Douglas in presenting business ideas to change the world, from prostitute-tracking plans (thankfully preempted by prior art) to a community-oriented embrace of institutional buggery. It wasn't pretty, but then paying for an emo kid's suicide in order to offset your carbon footprint, as winner GreenSuicides.com suggests, never is.

And here Mr. Henderson shook my hand and didn't mind at all when I said it was really his longtime companion Tom Coates, part of the Fire Eagle team and old queer hand of the blogosphere, whom I came out to meet. "We're here in my circle of exes," Culver continued. "And I have one to toss back at you," I added.

The rest of the evening is lost in a botched Flip video file sync — no footage for you — and a flurry of text messages wherein I tried to locate the guy getting a handjob in the men's room at the end of the night. No help from Fire Eagle there! Tip me if you know who the lucky jack was? (Photo by Andrew Mager)

1. Robert Scoble
2. Michael Arrington
3. Jack Dorsey
4. Biz Stone
5. Matt Cutts
6. Pete Cashmore
7. Dave Winer
8. Guy Kawasaki
9. Loïc Le Meur
10. Kevin Rose
11. Merlin Mann
12. Stowe Boyd
13. Jeff Atwood
14. Jeremiah Owyang
15. Veronica Belmont
16. Kara Swisher
17. Scott Beale
18. Marc Andreessen
19. Ryan Block
20. David Sifry
21. Emily Chang
22. Om Malik
23. Timothy Ferriss
24. Nick Douglas
25. John Battelle
26. David Cohn
27. Louis Gray
28. Tom Foremski
29. Tim O'Reilly
30. Ariel Waldman
31. Matt Mullenweg
32. Dean Takahashi
33. Philip Kaplan
34. JD Lasica
35. Sarah Lacy
36. Brian Solis
37. Charlene Li
38. Rafe Needleman
39. Dan Farber
40. Howard Rheingold
41. David McClure
42. Margaret Mason
43. Jason Goldman
44. Leah Culver
45. Chris Shipley
46. Jackson West
47. Liz Gannes
48. Owen Thomas
49. Adeo Ressi
50. Max Levchin

(Photo from Michael Arrington)

I also did not sleep with Xeni Jardin, though via someone I've slept with who slept with Blue, I'm only one more degree of separation from her bed. And if you hop a few lovers, it's almost like I've slept with another Boing Boing editor, Cory Doctorow. What I do have to disclose: It was Xeni Jardin who forwarded me Paul Boutin's original search request for a new Valleywag reporter, back in January. Founding Valleywag editor Nick Douglas is the only one around Valleywag that I do fuck, and that's never bought him a break from our standard abuse. Plus it's fun.

I'm avoiding that show with a ten foot pole. I have given Nick's show press in the past, and they inevitably failed miserably. So for his sake, I ain't gonna jinx it.

But why should we worry about all that? Check out Episode One, below. If BWC lasts even one-sixth as long Douglas's last venture, Goggleburn, Episode Two comes out next week.

Axe Mouth Spray from Nick Douglas on Vimeo.

I know, say it — there's women, who read Valleywag? Oh, honey. There was even something of a girl posse at the launch party back in the day, though I doubt this mystery Craigslist lady was among them as she's just relocated to the Valley. But don't hold that against her. She's in utterly shameless search of gossipy lurv, and that behavior we can only encourage.

If the ad is to be believed, she works in the Valley, and if she doesn't, God help her if she's harboring an Arrington crush. But for the sake of exploring her fantasy, let's assume she does actually work and, ahem, play here. She's looking for a guy like this not because she's so drawn into the bubble that she can't help but bring work into the bedroom, but because she gets off on it. Amazing. When did we create a fetish? As I've (mostly) sworn to never again help any of you get laid, the only advice I'll drop is this: let her make the first move when it comes to livestreaming your date.