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.

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)

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)

Fireworks, we thought, were inevitable when Lyons got on stage with Kawasaki, whom he's savaged on his blog. Turns out the worst thing Fake Steve said about Kawasaki was that he was a motorcycle designer, something Kawasaki found amusing. Our promised fireworks turned into kiddy-safe Independence Day sparklers.

Something to know about Dan Lyons: The man is as hilarious in person as in his best blog posts. He's quick, succinct, and dead-on with his observations. He is, as they say in Detroit, "wicked smaht." Also, he has a huge hard-on for Steve Jobs. Like, major mancrush. Lyons describes Jobs as a "son of Zeus born to a mere mortal" and other outrageous claims, which makes it seem like he's taking the piss out of Jobsian worshipers. Not true. Lyons really is an Apple fanboy who believes in the infallibility of His Steveness. Jobs is, to Lyons, "the most interesting person alive."

Which seems like the most boring thing he could say. But here's a secret for you: That awe is what makes the blog work. Lyons clearly venerates Jobs, without which his Fake Steve blog might come across as mean-spirited, not a satirical celebration.

One question kept coming up: How was Lyons treated by people who he slammed in the blog? He admitted to being worried about their reactions, but said that there have been few negative repercussions. He brought up Bike Helmet Girl, an early target for Fake Steve due to her appearance in a photo taken at a Yelp party last year. He initially ran the photo with a derisive caption. "Bikey" wrote in, a correspondence was born, and her character became a recurring figure in the blog. Lyons finally got a chance to meet her at a book signing last week, and spent a good minute in the Fake Steve character, dreamily recounting their meeting. (Lyons never revealed the lingering question about Bike Helmet Girl: Why was she wearing a bike helmet in the first place?)

I asked him about an article he wrote for Forbes, "Attack of the Blogs," a cover story which he railed against anonymous blogging as an abhorrent practice. Has being an anonymous blogger changed his mind about such practices? He admitted that he would like to "get a do-over" and rewrite the story. He likened his attack to writing a story focusing on spam as an example that all email was bad. "Tomorrow, Valleywag will call you a hypocrite," Kawasaki warned him.

Other Fake Steve revelations:

• Someone named "Katie Cotton" — the same name as the head of Apple PR — ordered a number of Fake Steve T-shirts from CafePress. (Brad Stone asked the real Cotton about the purchase. She declined to discuss any clothing purchases.)
• 
  
• The front row was filled with a line of Apple employees, one of whom brought an OS X programming book as light reading during downtime.
• 
  
• Kawasaki asked Lyons and Stone if they thought they would always be known as "Fake Steve" and "the guy who busted Fake Steve," much like Eddie Murphy will always be known as Donkey from Shrek. Lyons and Stone's reactions suggested they thought Kawasaki was nuts — and then started talking about how Donkey wasn't really representative of Eddie Murphy's career.
• 
  
• Brad Stone broke the news that Lyons was Fake Steve while Lyons was on his way to a Maine vacation with his wife, a vacation he had promised would be work- and blog-free. Stone's call to Lyons while he was en route changed all that. During their conversation, it was revealed that Lyons is the father of two-year-old twins. Stone and his wife are expecting twins soon. As their call was ending, Lyons promised Stone that he would buy two voodoo dolls of the twins and poke them at 2 a.m. random nights, to make up for Stone ruining Lyons's vacation.

• Tonight, in Mountain View, Forbes writer Dan Lyons meets with former Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki for a Q&A session hosted by LinkedIn. Will there be mud wrestling? We can only hope. [Upcoming]


• A panel on semantic search is taking place at Pillsbury Winthrop in Palo Alto. Former Powerset CEO Barney Pell is scheduled to speak. Take the chance to ask him about the rumored reasons he's no longer CEO of the hyped-up search engine. [VC Task Force]


• Hey, it's election day! The only big contest around here is for Mayor of San Francisco, which is going to be Gavin Newsom again. (Since when does one elect a God-Mayor? - Ed.) Still, though, go out and vote. It's your civic duty!

Got a to-do that's a must-do? Send it to calendar@valleywag.com. Check out more events on our Google Calendar:

The only thing you can conclude is that it's a crap shoot. You have no idea what is going to succeed.

I have a very low opinion of the blogosphere. I think it is made up of about 250,000 people who are mostly 45-year-old men who live with their mother and have dead cats in their refrigerators.

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.

• Guy Kawasaki was the first prominent high-tech corporate evangelist. During his tenure at Apple, the brand rose from an obscurity to the official computer maker for all cool consumers. In the last few years, the practices he started are responsible for the popularity of the iPod, the "switch" ads, and the smug satisfaction of every designer in your local wifi café, sneering at your Dell.
• Robert Scoble served as Microsoft's de facto representative to bloggers when he started pimping his company on his site, Scobleizer. It all worked so well — until Scoble's ill-advised porn shoot. Just a few months later, Scoble left Microsoft. Coincidence? Heck no.
• Vint Cerf is supposed to make people feel more at ease about Google and the Internet. How can anyone feel at ease next to Mr. Oh-so-snappy-in-my-three-piece-suit (pictured)?

Earlier: Nerdfight! Blogger Shelley Powers smacks down Zooomr
Photo 1: Thomas Hawk [Zooomr]
Photo 2: YouTube video [Valleywag]

4. Your CEO's admin has an admin.

And this Google-killer:

7. Time is now considered more important than money so you have a company cafeteria, health club, and pet grooming service. Moreover, the first thing that employees show visitors is the company cafeteria, health club, and pet grooming service.

Ouch, Google won't come out of this intact:

27. Your CEO gets invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos where he gives advice to the presidents of Eastern European countries.

Blogger Robert Scoble scores Microsoft at 11 on this 35-point test. I need a little help here — give your company's score in the comments. Anyone at Google, Yahoo, Apple, Oracle, or anyone else we're obsessed with here, feel free to e-mail in your score.

GBAT: Score High and Cry [Guy Kawasaki]