Noted author Jeffrey S. Young, author of iCon — the recent Jobs biography that resulted in all of publisher Wiley’s titles getting banned from the shelves in Apple’s stores — is blogging for ZD Net, a good thing because Young’s been a blogger for years but hasn’t known it. Dan Farber will find himself with a handful in Young — who I edited in the first days of Forbes.com — but if initial posts are any indication, Young will distinguish himself.
Formerly colleagues at PC Week — where his scoop on Job’s first Next machine (ask Jimmy Guterman about that escapade, traveling to England to find the black box clad in a down-vest to cover it from inquiring eyes) shook things up, and then at Forbes, where we collaborated on what should have been a cover story on the impact of broadband on rural backwaters inspired by the late Walter Wriston, and where he went on to write a compendium of the greatest technology stories for Forbes and Wiley under the Forbes “Great Stories of Business” imprint, Young has been a part of my professional life since the mid-80s.
He is also the screenwriter behind Flesh Gordon, an utterly bizarre soft-core porno he penned while at the UCLA film school.
Today he is encamped in Rescue, California, somewhere in Gold Country above Sacramento, setting his fields on fire and tending his vineyards with fellow PC Week alum, Jim Forbes, who need desperately to come up with a better title for his excellent blog than the generic “My Blog.”
Young’s current take on Cisco’s China play is pretty savage and to the point. While some may take exception to Young’s assertion, especially John Chambers, that Cisco is helping China build a Big Brother society through the deployment of IP-enabled security cameras just in time for the ’08 Beijing Summer Olympics, he displays some good reporting and blogger-esque editorializing. Into my Bloglines he goes.
Anything more you can tell me about Mr. Young? I’m supposed to meet him in the morning. -sno
What do you want to know?