• 0:55 Loic Le Meur is worried about the economy.
• 1:14 Brandee Barker hides behind a fern, says Facebook will never sell to Microsoft
• 2:30 BillShrink’s Peter Pham says a lot of startups are going to go under
• 2:36 Randi Zuckerberg wants you to register to vote
• 3:32 Steven Levy says the arrow points no where but up
• 5:43 Israeli superinvestor Yossi Vardi says that Lehman Brothers stock isn't worth as much as World of Warcraft shields.

The trick was we knew it was going to launch sometime in early September, and we wanted to be out with it as close as possible. That meant the story had to close in late August when it was still a huge secret. Both Steven and I had made considerable promises that it wouldn't leak from us. We pledged that we could be trusted with this information in advance so we could produce a long-form magazine story on a monthly cycle.

Cohn set aside space for the feature under a codename, "Go Lego" — an obvious anagram of "Google," but also a plausible topic for Wired to cover. Files were saved in space used for the September issue, because "no one ever looks back at the old issue," says Cohn. Then, Cohn told staffers the fake story was cancelled. "We told people that we're going to pull that story for ad sales reasons, but we're going to keep it on the map for bureaucratic reasons," says Cohn. Those in on the secret prepared a fake table of contents and even a cover.

"Only 8 or 10 people knew — not because we don't trust people, but because I and Steven had pledged it would be very closely held," says Cohn. (Wired has a staff of 49, according to the masthead.) "Normally the staff sees the entire magazine. I sent out an email this morning letting people know. A lot of people came into my office surprised there was a story they didn't even know about, words on the cover they hadn't read."

Did it ruffle feathers? Perhaps a little, says Cohn: "This morning an editor told me about a story he was working on, and then he said, 'And there's a secret story I can't tell you about.'"

What's telling about this episode? There's more at work here than the standard negotiations for a fly-on-the-wall feature, I think. Google's workers are so fervent in their do-gooder convictions — that their viewpoints are reasonable, that their requests for secrecy are normal, that their cause is fair and just — that they can't help being a bit infectious. Google Chrome has a feature that puts the browser in an ultraprivate mode. Here's the question: Can Googlers ever turn off their own secrecy switch?

Set on a planet called Arbe (pronounced "arb"), Anathem documents a civilization split between two cultures: an indulgent Saecular general population (hooked on casinos, shopping in megastores, trashing the environment—sound familiar?) and the super-educated cohort known as the avaunt, or "auts,"

• 1. The planet's name is spelled Arbre.
• 2. They're the avout, not avaunt. It comes from the Latin a- + vovere, to vow. The avout are, literally, those who've vowed to follow the fictional Cartasian discipline.
• 3. No, no, no, an aut in the book is a rite performed by the avout. Why am I huffy about this? Because Stephenson provides a 20-page glossary at the back of the book.

Their society—the "mathic" world—is clustered in walled-off areas known as concents built around giant clocks designed to last for centuries.

• 4. Earth already has a 622 year old clock that still runs in the cathedral at Salisbury, England. The science-fiction clocks on planet Arbre are designed to last for millennia, like Danny Hillis's planned 10,000 Year Clock. Many of the clocks in Anathem are several thousand years old.

[Stephenson's] early books, a satire about big universities and an eco-thriller, were well received but not huge sellers. In search of big sales and big bucks, he collaborated with an uncle on a couple of political potboilers. "We heard that Tom Clancy had made something like $17 million the previous year and thought if we could snag 1 percent of that, we'd still be OK." They didn't come close, and in 1991, Stephenson says, his career "was moving along at low rpms." Then he wrote Snow Crash ...

• 5. Those political thrillers, Interface and The Cobweb, postdate Snow Crash by several years — 1992, 1994 and 1996, respectively.

But hey, nobody's perfect. Anathem itself has at least one glaring mistake: Midway through, the main character describes a group of people as being treated like "movie stars." As Stephenson's previous 491 pages have made abundantly clear, the word "movie" can't possibly be in the narrator's vocabulary — on planet Arbre, they'd be speely stars. Take that, correctards!

• The lowest level goes to bloggers and reporters from sites with few readers — they get onto the show floor for free, but don't get entry into the all-important Steve Jobs keynote.
• The standard press badge, pictured above, gives access to all the floor and the special media section of the keynote.
• The truly special press have the VIP ribbon (left) affixed to their badge. We spotted one on John Markoff of the New York Times, Newsweek's Steven Levy, and Walt Mossberg of the Walt — sorry, Wall Street Journal. A Macworld veteran told us they're reserved for "geezers."

  When the doors opened for press to enter the keynote, broadcast media were let in first — but Mossberg used his clout to cut in line. "I'm VIP," he said, waved his badge and walked past. The rest of us had to deal with security guards with a small Apple logo emblazoned on their black shirts like we were paparazzi waiting to get into a restaurant where Britney Spears was eating.

  We didn't rate VIP status, but we had something better: Fake Steve Jobs!

Newsweek had an glowing exclusive review from Steven Levy and New York Times tech reviewer David Pogue wrote up the Kindle soon after it was made public, but it took Mossberg more than a week to review the device. What happened? Another tech columnist told us that Mossberg "was only interested in reviewing it if he could be first. When Steven Levy got it first Walt threw a tantrum." Classy. We also hear Mossberg tried to edge out other reviewers to be first on the iPhone — but got turned down. Incidentally, I still haven't gotten any response from Amazon PR about a review unit. What's up with that? I'll be nicer than Mossberg — maybe.

• Former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel invested $500,000 in Facebook.
• Zuckerberg clinched his $12.7 million investment in 2005 from Accel Partners by ordering a Sprite, since he was still underage.
• Facebook raised another $25 million round in 2006.
• Microsoft's contract to sell ads on Facebook runs through 2011.

• FOR The sense of humor. Ihnatko's writing has verve, panache, and more than its fair share of randomness — traits shared by whoever's writing Fake Steve Jobs.
• FOR The IP address. At first, I was inclined to dismiss the "discovery" by Web developers at Sitening that Fake Steve Jobs has sent email from a Boston-area Internet connection. (The same data that Sitening uncovered through their elaborate sting operation was available, for months, to anyone who bothered to look at FSJ's email headers, and well known among FSJ trackers.) But everyone, in their rush to re-report this old news, has failed to notice the obvious: Andy Ihnatko is a Verizon customer.
• FOR The desperation. For all his cunning insights about Apple and the tech world, Fake Steve Jobs appears to be a naif when it comes to business. He's been hitting up potential advertising sponsors for a while, and he recently begged for help with setting up Google AdSense on the FSJ blog, in a post that was subsequently taken down. Ihnatko's own blog, YellowText, also currently doesn't run ads. Is that because Ihnatko makes enough money from his publishing royalties that he doesn't have to bother — or because, like FSJ, he doesn't know how to insert ads onto his blog?
• FOR The silence. Ihnatko has never written about Fake Steve. Fake Steve has never written about Ihnatko.

• AGAINST The sense of humor. Ihnatko is funny, but Fake Steve is funnier. Way funnier. If it's Ihnatko, he's saving his best stuff for his alter ego, which might annoy his editors at the Chicago Sun-Times.
• AGAINST The IP address. Geotargeting is hardly an exact science. Advertisers who try to use it to target local ads know that it's notoriously unreliable. And even if it's accurate in this case, who's to say Fake Steve Jobs wasn't traveling in the Boston area when he sent those emails?
• AGAINST The insiders. Chris Nolan, the former Silicon Valley gossip columnist who now runs online-content distributor Spot On, insists that FSJ is not a writer, based on her email conversations with him. (Update: Nolan asked me to clarify that she meant a professional writer, which is also how I took it.) Steven Levy of Newsweek, I hear, believes that he's a former Internet-media CEO. And many others believe that FSJ is written by multiple people.

Steven Levy of Newsweek, "one of only four" people allowed to review the iPhone early, was just jumped and nearly mugged, live on Fox News (9:26 AM EDT). The foolish mugger — who appears to have been going for the iPhone, but grabbed the Fox reporter's mic instead — was quickly dispatched by police and camera men. Levy quickly bounced up and proceeded to demo the device (it did not appear to be scratched or harmed for those concerned) with much aplomb to the shaken announcer — even though Fox initially cut away and did not know how to handle the situation. Now that the iPhone will be released, you don't need to hide it... but you might be wise to do so. The video, after the jump.