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O’Reilly Announces Publishing Agreement with Wil Wheaton

O’Reilly Announces Publishing Agreement with Wil Wheaton

This press release fresh in, we are not Wil Wheaton fans, but he does demonstrate the power of blogs in building fame, and the language in the press release is some of the most bizarre and whacky spin ever written:
SEBASTOPOL, Calif., Dec. 8 — Any honest computer geek will
admit that his obsessive coding is, at heart, a futile attempt to create a
world as cool as those depicted in science fiction. New evidence of the
symbiotic relationship between Sci Fi and geekdom surfaced today, as O’Reilly & Associates, the geek publisher-of-record, announced plans to publish three books by Wil Wheaton, blogger, geek, and the actor who portrayed Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

“This is a very exciting relationship for me, for several reasons,” said
Wheaton. “First, I am a huge geek, and without O’Reilly, I wouldn’t know HTML
from LMNOP. I never would have been able to get Linux running, and Perl would
be one of the not-quite-as-good-as-Mrs.-Garrett replacements on Diff’rent
Strokes. Now, I’ll be able to get my books into more stores than I ever was
with my own Monolith Press. I can’t wait to see how Dancing Barefoot does when
it’s got a major publisher behind it.”
Wheaton’s first two books, Dancing Barefoot and Just a Geek, are almost
unbearably honest tales of life, love, and the rigors of being an ensign on
the Starship Enterprise. First self-published by Wheaton in May 2003 and
available only on the Internet and in select independent bookstores, Dancing
Barefoot quickly sold out its initial run of 3000. The O’Reilly edition will
be available in all major bookstores in early 2004.
Just a Geek, coming in Spring 2004, continues the story of Wheaton’s
transformation from teen actor to grown-up writer, computer geek, actor,
husband, and stepfather. Along the way, Wil comes to terms with his Star Trek
fame, creates the hugely popular weblog wilwheaton.net, and realizes that
playing himself is the role of a lifetime.
In June 2001, Wheaton built wilwheaton.net (also known as WWdN), and soon
garnered a large and loyal readership. The antithesis of the typical slick
celebrity website, WWdN is a highly personal, opinionated, and candid account
of Wheaton’s life. It’s also a clean, well-designed site built on code that
works. Wheaton shares his hard-won expertise in Wil Wheaton’s Website Design,
slated for release in early 2005.

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