Four True Ways To Be A Published Authority

by Henry DeVries

One of my heroes, Guy Kawasaki, is out to democratize the spread of information with a new venture called Truemors. If anyone can change the world without firing a shot, it is Guy.

Kawasaki is a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm and a columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine. Previously, he was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer, Inc. Guy is the author of eight books including The Art of the Start, Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, Selling the Dream, and The Macintosh Way.

I say I first met Guy through my friend Lisa Nirell (Chief Energy Officer of EnergizeGrowth.com) when he was writing the book The Art of the Start. In truth, I met him a decade earlier through the pages of a book I read over and over, his take on business evangelism called Selling the Dream. These are two business books I can’t say enough good things about.
According to his latest venture, www.truemors.com, you are invited to become a “citizen journalist/editor” and “tell the world”—within the bounds of good taste and the law anyway.
Second, from a reader perspective, it puts you “in the know” about the latest news, rumors, and happenings, so that “you know better” without having to spend hours every day searching for information.

Simply stated Truemors is not interested in crap. Some crap, says the Web site, is easy to recognize: profanity, pornography, bullying, libel, slander, and advertising.

The content that Guy and his cofounders want are true rumors that are relevant, informative, and interesting. Reading them would make them a person more interesting. Gossip, by contrast, is less urgent, less useful, and almost always deals with people’s private lives.

In other words, says the Web site, if we wanted gossip, we would have called our site “Truessip” or some such drivel.

The Web site covers the evolution of information. A long time ago royalty and religious leaders had scribes. Around 600 the Chinese printed using negative reliefs. Around 1450 Johann Gutenberg combined hundreds of years of progress into the screw printing press.

Fast forward to 1985 when Apple (Macintosh), Aldus (PageMaker), and Adobe (PostScript) produced “desktop publishing.” A few years later people could create Web sites. Then blogging appeared on the scene. Still, people needed a computer and a blogging tool like WordPress or TypePad to disseminate information. Kawasaki believes he has created a better way.

You can post your information on Truemors in four ways:
Call 1-650-329-2020 and leave a voicemail. SpinVox will translate your voicemail to text and send it to our server. Incidentally, you can speak in English, German, Spanish, and French. Your message, however, will remain in the language you spoke.
Text “2020 ” to 55022.
Enter your message in an online form on the Web site
Send an email to post@truemors.com. FYI, this is a SpamArrest-protected email address, so you’ll have to confirm your address.
How much does it cost to change the world?

“In total, I spent $12,107.09 to launch Truemors,” Kawasaki said in his Change the World blog. ”During the dotcom days, entrepreneurs had to raise $5 million to try stupid ideas. Now I’ve proven that you can do it for $12,107.09.”
By the way, Guy has an honorary doctorate from Babson College, an MBA from UCLA and a BA from Stanford. To say thanks for writing the foreword to my new book with Chris Stiehl called Pain Killer Marketing, we invited Guy to be our guest at last fall’s sold out USC-Stanford football game. But he declined and chose instead to stay home to spend time with his four kids. He missed Stanford’s last second shocking upset of number one ranked USC, but as always he has his priorities straight. And that is the truth.