Considering the ongoing skirmishes going on right now between Amazon and Google over digital book publishing, it’s more than ironic that Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos was one of only a few initial investors in the search giant.

But–in one of the many interesting details in New Yorker author Ken Auletta’s new book, “Googled: The End Of The World As We Know It”–it was indeed Bezos who invested $250,000 in the start-up in 1998 at four cents a share.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that!

There’s a great excerpt in the New Yorker this week.

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Ok, not that secret a project.

BoomTown has known about it forever and Radar Online gave the lowdown about the creation of the hip-sounding news aggregator Web site–headed by high-profile editor Tina Brown–by Barry Diller’s IAC in a report in early April.

While still in its planning stages, though, it just hired a new GM to run the business: Caroline Marks.

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I usually don’t have a lot of time to get through big, long thumbsuckers in magazines any more–what can I say? I can hardly keep up with my Twitter feed–but here are two worth a look.

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And can they ever get along?
At the SIIA Information Summit yesterday, New Yorker writer Ken Auletta, who recently did a piece on Google, noted:
We’re in an engineering culture. You couldn’t put a [Rupert] Murdoch or a [Michael] Eisner in charge of a company like that. It’s been tried. Terry Semel led Yahoo. I just spent [...]

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It would be remiss of me not to mention the long piece on Walt Mossberg, my partner in AllThingsD.com and the D conference, that appeared today online and in print in the New Yorker magazine. Written by well-known media chronicler Ken Auletta, the piece, called “Critical Mass,” had the subhead: “Everyone Listens to Walter Mossberg.”
Here [...]

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