A year ago, prolific advice-giver Guy Kawasaki bragged about Truemors, a "a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site" he built entirely on outsourced technology, including $4,500 of software development done in South Dakota. Today, all Truemors URLs redirect to the home page of NowPublic, a little-known citizen journalism site reported to have raised over $10 million. VentureBeat reports that Kawasaki has sold the site to NowPublic. He's almost certainly made a profit, but how much?

If Truemors had really built value, NowPublic would have left the site running. As is, it looks like Truemors' residual traffic is all they want. That's not a million-dollar deal. Kawasaki's real success is as a storyteller — in books, at conferences, and online. He's now got another story to tell. Mission accomplished.

(Photo via Threadless T-Shirts)

Guy Kawasaki, returning to the scene of the crime (the creation of his image), does carry some interest, and certainly his personal coverage could yield unique insight as a former high-profile Apple employee. But feeding this coverage through Truemors is merely sad and desperate. Each site providing coverage has their own pros and cons (speed, heavy traffic, accuracy, detail, wit), but anyone tuning into Truemors as their primary source for Jobs WWDC keynote is as delusional as Kawasaki. (Of course, I will tune in to see how his stunt pans out.)

By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09

5 catch phrases. The 5 buzzworthy phrases of the industry are: Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, and Social Media. Their use may yield some sympathy within the community.

0 Business Plans. If you don't write it down, it doesn't count.

0 VC Pitches. 0 VCs turned down funding the nonexistent business plan.

$12,107.09. The amount a 53 year old Venture Capitalist with no programming skills can charge on his credit charge to create a web site that teenagers are creating during study period. (37% development, 40% legal, 3% design, 9% domain registration, 10% undisclosed?)

55 domain names. Because even if its a casual experiment that you don't take seriously, the idea may take off in Cameroon.

1.5 Employees. Presumably, Kawasaki's "love" counts as half an employee.

3 Techcrunch posts. Truemors got 2 more Techcrunch posts than every other startup in the industry; it also received 2 more negative posts than most startups covered by TechCrunch.

261,214 Page Views. Digg, TechMeme, TechCrunch, and much of the tech blogosphere only drove 261,214 page views?

24 years of schmoozing. 24 years of priceless image creation and promotion does not count as a cost or marketing.

218/405. A great batting average; a horrible spam to "legitimate" truemor post ratio.

3 hours to be hacked. Hackers are more "impressive" than the developers who cost $4,500 and took 7.5 weeks to develop your site.

$120.04. The amount of monthly revenue from Yahoo that Truemors lost in less than 2 days.

15,004. The decline in page views after 2 days (a little more than 5%). Thank God for bad PR because without a bad review from The Inquirer, the number of page views would have been 0.

5. 5 lessons learned:
1. "There's no such thing as bad PR" is a lesson when you've never had bad PR before; for everyone else it is a cliché.
2. You get what you pay for, another cliché.
3. It's easy to cast blame at low cost developers "thousand of miles away."
4. "Life is good" when you can live off of an image serendipitously crafted 24 years ago.
5. There is little evidence that Guy has built a business for $12,107.09. He has shown the value of his name and his abilities as an evangelist to continually self-promote himself.