Today’s San Francisco Chronicle has more details on the upcoming wedding of Google founder Larry Page and his girlfriend Lucy Southworth. The Chronicle confirms that it will be happening the weekend of December 8, but they can’t seem to find the location. As we told you earlier this month, it’s taking place on Necker Island, the Caribbean hideaway owned by Virgin billionaire Richard Branson. Branson, naturally, is expected to attend the event, along with San Francisco god-mayor Gavin Newsom and “many current and former Google employees” (Perhaps ex-girlfriend Marissa Mayer?). One person, though, is skipping the bash.

That’s former U.S. Vice President and current Google “senior advisor” Al Gore, who has a previous engagement in Oslo, Norway that weekend — he’s receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. (”Larry Page allowed that, on the list of excuses, that was acceptable,” Gore told the Chronicle.) Gore is hoping to attend via videoconferencing, destroying any pretense of this being a high-society soirée –Necker’s going to be Nerd Island for the weekend.

Source:Valleywag

The slight case of sniffles and coughs making the rounds in SF has been dubbed the Woz Cold. Urban legend has it that Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak appeared to introduce Fake Steve blogger Dan Lyons on the Peninsula a week ago despite a nagging head and/or chest cold, depending on who you ask. Woz shook hands and buddied up for photos at the event. Now we’re all snuffling and Apple’s stock is … oh wait, it’s back near 170. Never mind.

New York Times reporter Saul Hansell wails on a bogus reporter’s convention, “writing about rises in stock prices as good and declines as bad. The story can equally well be told in the reverse. Every stock sale has a buyer and seller. Why shouldn’t the headline be: Millions Now Can Buy Stocks Cheaply for Retirement Accounts?” Falling tech stocks also prevent idiotic reversals of power, such as AOL buying Time Warner.

Let us bow and say thank you to the gods of Silicon Valley for everything that’s not in this 1994 version of “24.”

Source:Valleywag
Today’s most popular headlines are Facebook’s internal “Wall of Shame” (1,917 views today), 8 steps to getting fans on Facebook (1,404) and How Microsoft knifed its CIO (1,124). Today’s most discussed stories are Never have truer words been spammed (5 comments), Microsoft exec trashes Google’s OpenSocial (4) and Why isn’t the Googlephone guy rich? (4).

Source:Valleywag

The dirty secret behind last night’s book-tour party for Dan Lyons, the man behind the Fake Steve Jobs blog? Rumor is it almost didn’t happen, thanks to a little tiff over who was going to rep him. Flack fight! After the jump, the real battle over Fake Steve.

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Here’s the back story. Marc Bodnick, a cofounder of Elevation Partners, the private-equity firm behind Forbes, where Lyons has a day job, suggested plugged-in matchmaker Brooke Hammerling to make high-level introductions in the Valley. This move, insiders say, confounded Lyons’s publisher, Da Capo Press, which had its own PR operation, and momentarily threw plans for the party out of joint. Hammerling vehemently denies there was any friction. Da Capo ended up handling press for Lyons’s book tour, and Hammerling and the book publisher threw a joint party at Frisson, the restaurant part-owned by Facebook board member Peter Thiel.

Thiel, alas, didn’t show, but San Francisco’s tech press corps turned out in droves, and in the case of videoblogger Natali Del Conte, kickass boots. Also crowding the joint: a bevy of Lyons’s Forbes colleagues, past and present, and backers from Elevation Partners. Digg board member Brett Bullington no-commented his way through the evening. An unusually buttoned-up Hammerling, when she wasn’t schmoozing, was ringing up copies of Options for Lyons to sign.

Source:Valleywag

“Once every hundred years media changes.” With those words, at 2:37 PM Eastern time yesterday, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg officially flipped Silicon Valley’s bozo bit. East Coast cynic Nick Carr has the best response:

It’s true. Look back over the last millennium or two, and you’ll see that every century, like clockwork, there’s been a big change in media. Cave painting lasted a hundred years, and then there was smoke signaling, which also lasted a hundred years, and of course there was the hundred years of yodeling, and then there was the printing press, which was invented almost precisely 100 years ago, and so forth and so on up to the present day — the day that Facebook picked up the 100-year torch and ran with it.

Source:Valleywag

The Q&A session at the Computer History Museum last night was billed as a talk between former Apple evangelist turned venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki and former anonymous blogger turned book shill Dan Lyons, better known as Fake Steve Jobs. But it quickly turned into a sordid three-way. Brad Stone, the New York Times scribe who outed Lyons as Fake Steve joined the two on stage, and what was billed as the “Confessions of Fake Steve Jobs” turned into a celebration of Apple, blogging, and Dan Lyons’s massive mancrush on the real Steve Jobs.

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.

So I’m here at Keplers, the bookstore in Menlo Park, with a bunch of Stevetards waiting for Dan Lyons, the faux Apple CEO who pens The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs and the new book Options, a parody memoir of Steve Jobs. Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak has taken the podium, and is speaking a mile a minute, referencing his on-again, off-again romance with comedienne Kathy Griffin. And then he spins into a weird numerological digression. I’m starting to think this guy is actually kind of nuts. And then Wozniak presents him with a genuine Apple turtleneck. It’s only getting weirder from here, I fear.

“This is the highlight of my life — the birth of my children, and meeting Woz,” says Lyons, like some pathetic starstruck fanboy. This is the man who called me “Bigglesworth“? I’m wondering who the real pussycat is.

Lyons starts by explaining how he got the “Secret Diary” moniker from the British magazine Private Eye. The whole idea, he explains, was just to learn more about blogging and figure out how tools like Blogger works. The blog spiraled from there.

“I don’t know anything about Steve Jobs,” Lyons says. “This is as close as I’ve ever gotten,” he adds, pointing to Wozniak. He recounts how he closed down the blog, and a reader actually reposted his archive, which prompted Lyons to continue.

Lyons then makes a gaffe: “I’ve written a lot of books, which are still available on Amazon.com.” The owner of Keplers coughs and glares at him. “Sorry. In a brick-and-mortar store, you never say the ‘A’ word.”

Options, the parody Steve Jobs novel, has totally surprised those of us who expected a throwaway. It’s 248 mostly hilarious pages, with a tight story line and a protagonist who evolves credibly. You can read my enthusiastic review in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, where it’s the business book of the week. But more important is this teaser email from Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, where author Dan Lyons will appear Thursday evening.

Date: Oct 30, 2007 5:06 PM
Subject: Kepler’s
To: fakestevejobs
I will be hosting you at Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park CA. this
Thursday. I just wanted you to know I have someone special from Apple
Computer coming to introduce you, and his name is Steve as well.

Omigosh! Oh wait. This is going to be Steve Wozniak, right? Still. We’ll be there.

WEB 2.0 SUMMIT — Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr is on stage, getting interviewed by conference organizer John Battelle. His explanation for why he invested in Google? Larry and Sergey were “really nerdy” and had no social lives. There’s something to that. Does that mean Doerr will start selling his still-extensive Google holdings, now that Sergey seems to be comfortable taking the night off? We can only imagine what he thinks about anyone prone to playing the John Doerr drinking game.

Battelle asks Doerr why Kleiner didn’t invest in Facebook. “Out of loyalty,” says Doerr, citing his firm’s investment in Friendster. Oops. Doerr goes on to note that Friendster is big in Malaysia, drawing derisive laughter from the audience. He sounds equally ridiculous when Battelle asks him if Kleiner missed this generation of Web startups. Doerr cites Google and Amazon.com as Web 2.0 startups, and says that his firm has backed 20 new Web startups in the past year. (We should put this on the drinking game next time.)

Doerr and Battelle talk politics a bit. “You can’t just fly in there when you have an idea,” says Doerr. Sounds like verbatim advice he’s given to Larry and Sergey, doesn’t it?

Battelle asks Doerr to talk about the environment. Finally, the first drink!

Source:Valleywag

Author Dan Lyons saw our excerpts from Options, his fictional novel as Fake Steve Jobs, and alerted his publisher. A nice young man from Sub Rights (whatever that is) rang my cellphone and, after checking out our posts, had one word: “Awesome.” After the jump, a bonus three-fer.

Everywhere I go people recognize me, and they get all weird around me, and you know what? I love it. I never get tired of it. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s retards like Britney Spears who say they wish they weren’t famous. Come on. If you really feel that way, then give away all your money, turn your wigger spawn over to Child Protective Services, and move your cottage cheesy ass to Tibet. What’s that? Yeah. That’s what I thought. So shut up.

We make our own special chips, our own special software. We put the chips and software into the physical design and I do some more non-thinking meditation. Unfortunately it often occurs that the software is amazing but it doesn’t feel right in this physical package, and so we have to go back and redesign the phone all over again. Then there’s the color issue. You can’t imagine how many shades of black there are. And white.

These idiots went after dozens of companies in Silicon Valley. They concocted a fairy tale about greedy executives lining their pockets and cheating investors, and of course the nitwits in the press bought the whole story and ran with it, because let me tell you something, if there’s any group of people in the world who are suckers for a story about evil rich people, it’s the filthy hacks in the media. These spiteful, hateful, small-dicked losers spend their entire lives in a constant state of jealousy and resentment. Here’s their job description: Interview people who are richer, more successful, and more interesting than you are.

Lyons rarely lets up for the next 245 pages. Every single Bay Area Borders has sold out its advance stack, but you can buy the book online.

Looking for a copy of Options, Fake Steve Jobs blogger Dan Lyons’s parody of the Apple guru? As I type this, Borders in San Mateo has 3 copies. The San Francisco stores in Union Square and Stonestown each have 5. Sometimes, people, you need to quit Googling and pick up the phone. Dial now and ask them to hold you one, which they’ll do for three days.