Linked List: August 5, 2007

Sunday, 5 August 2007

Forbes Phone Interview With Daniel Lyons 

Wishes he could have stayed secret at least until his book comes out in October.

Fake Steve on Fortune, BusinessWeek, and Forbes 

Lots of scathing critiques and mockery of Fortune and BusinessWeek (and their writers — see here and here). E.g. this piece on BusinessWeek (with bonus digs at Business 2.0):

Dude, if I wanted to be told the obvious, I’d subscribe to BusinessWeek. (You’ve heard their new slogan? BusinessWeek: In case you missed the Journal last week.)

Not as much about Forbes, and nothing personally mocking any particular Forbes writers. But there is this piece where Bono tells Fake Steve about his stint as “guest editor” of Vanity Fair:

“Yeah, first I was gonna try and edit an edition of Forbes, seeing that I own the fookin place and all, but you know what? I tried to read some of their stories and I fookin fell asleep! No shite, Steve. I mean I really tried. No matter what, I’d fall asleep. Coffee, electrodes, toothpicks to hold up my eyelids — fookin asleep in like five minutes. […] I told dose guys you need more fookin celebrities or sumfin. Spark it up a bit. Guy tells me, Oh, no, we actually go out of our way to make it less exciting. Our average reader is like seventy-eight years old and we don’t want to scare them.

The Talk Show, Episode 5 

British vs. American English, web typography, profanity, and more — all on this week’s episode of The Talk Show, with Dan Benjamin and yours truly. This one came out pretty good.

NYTimes.com Placement of Fake Steve Scoop 

Jiminy, they’ve got the Fake Steve story in the fourth spot on the NYTimes.com homepage.

Fake Steve: ‘Damn, I Am So Busted, Yo’ 

Fake Steve:

Well, tip of the hat to you, Brad Stone. You did the sleuthing. You put the pieces of the puzzle together. You went through my trash, hacked into my computer, and put listening devices in my home. Now you’ve ruined the mystery of Fake Steve, robbing thousands of people around the world of their sense of childlike wonder. Hope you feel good about yourself, you mangina. One bright side is that at least I was busted by the Times and not Valleywag.

As for my earlier question re: what Lyons’s bosses at Forbes thought:

Then I’m coming back next week, badder than ever, with a new sponsor — my homeboys at Forbes.com. Turns out they’ve been reading FSJ and liking it too. Who knew?

Floating Point 

Weblog by Daniel Lyons, author of The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs. Number of times he’s mentioned “fake steve”: zero.

The New York Times Unmasks Fake Steve Jobs 

Brad Stone, reporting for The New York Times, has the scoop:

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Daniel Lyons, a senior editor at Forbes magazine who lives near Boston, has been quietly enjoying the attention.

“I’m stunned that it’s taken this long,” said Mr. Lyons, 46, when a reporter interrupted his vacation in Maine on Sunday to ask him about Fake Steve. “I have not been that good at keeping it a secret. I’ve been sort of waiting for this call for months.”

Mr. Lyons writes and edits technology articles for Forbes and is the author of two works of fiction, most recently a 1998 novel, “Dog Days.” In October, Da Capo Press will publish his satirical novel written in the voice of the Fake Steve character, “Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, a Parody.”

Thus explaining Fake Steve’s obsession with and hyper-detailed analysis of the business press. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to the weblog now that Lyons is no longer anonymous. My hope is that it just keeps going, unchanged. But did his editors at Forbes know about this? Do they care now?

Update: Clearly, it’s OK with Forbes, as they’ve just announced they’ll be publishing the weblog. Includes a photograph of Mr. Lyons.

Amazon Flexible Payment Service 

Amazon Web Services rival to Google Checkout and PayPal. Advantages: significantly lower fees for debit card transactions (debit cards cost less to process than credit cards, and Amazon passes the savings along; PayPal keeps the savings for themselves) and, for customers who already have Amazon accounts, express checkout.

Interesting but unsurprising sign of the times: they’ve got example code for Java, PHP, Ruby, and C#, but none for Perl.

Blueprint: A CSS Framework 

Well-documented open source CSS framework for grid-based layouts.

Walt Mossberg: ‘Secret New iPhone Features’ 

New features, undocumented by Apple, in the iPhone 1.0.1 update. The big one I’ve noticed is that textarea fields in MobileSafari now support onkey* keyboard events, which means the live character counts in Twitter clients work.