Excerpted from Silicon Alley Insider:

Aaron Peskin, president of San Francisco's board of supervisors, has been accused of making harassing phone calls to Port of San Francsico authorities who wanted to allow new buildings on the city's waterfront to exceed a 40-foot height limit favored by Peskin and other residents of Telegraph Hill, whose views would be altered by taller buildings. I've excerpted the juicy part of the lengthy complaint from one official that made the front page of Thursday's Chronicle. (Required disclosure: I used to be a member of the powerful, preservationist Telegraph Hill Dwellers neighborhood association in Peskin's district. I'm a total viewmonger.)

I've excerpted the relevant parts of Harbinger Capital Partners' letter to New York Times management proposing four new directors and a more aggressive online strategy.

"It will forever be one of the highlights of my life," Scoble writes at the beginning of a 1,535-word epic love poem describing a three-hour walk he took around Davos, Switzerland with Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Here's a condensed version — though it's a bit long because we included all of Scoble's gratuitous namedrops, which we've bolded.

Max Levchin's widget maker Slide just took on funding that set its value at $550 million. And the company's user base grew 142 percent in a year to 150 million users, giving it the ninth largest "reach" on the Internet. Maybe this means its worth paying attention to Levchin's ideas on "How to successfully launch a social networking platform? Maybe. But not for more than 100 words.

Fired Connected Ventures founder Jakob Lodwick thought it would take a whole 300 or so words to humiliate his ex-girlfriend, Star editor-at-large and Mossberg-esque technology evangelist Julia Allison. All this because Lodwick and Allison's relationship — friends prefer to characterize it as a postmodern art project — went awry. But Jake, there was no need to go over a 100 words.

Laid off? Here's the good news. You have plenty of time to read Robert Scoble's 1,416-word post on what to do. But if your just looking for your morning hit of schadenfreude, well, then you'll need our 100-word version.

BusinessWeek's Spencer Ante has another interview outtake with former Hewlett-Packard board member and Kleiner Perkins cofounder Tom Perkins. In it, Perkins explains how he helped turn around HP. Here's the 100-word version of the harrowing tale of board committees, patent policies and microprocessors oh my!

Blogoscoped corralled Ruth Kedar of KedarDesigns into recounting the story of how she came up with the Google logo back in 1999. It's a charming story, but not one that should have taken 619 words to explain. Here's a version for the ADD among us.

Facebook funder Peter Thiel is a "neocon" who is trying to "destroy the real world." So says British journalist Tom Hodgkinson in a feature-length screed for The Guardian. You really don't want to miss a word of this one — it's a classic Cassandra piece — but OK, I'll 100-word it after the jump.

"Google's Search Party," Ken Auletta's 6,264-word opus on the search engine's grudging embrace of D.C. lobbying, has proved tough to condense. Until I reread it again this weekend, and realized it can be boiled down to the final observation made by CEO Eric Schmidt:

Self-styled serious bloggers are tripping over each other to distance themselves from Gizmodo's childishly funny prank at CES, in which Gawker Media class clown Richard Blakeley turned off entire banks of TV displays with a remote control. The critics advocate for more maturity and morality, in posts titled "douche" and "crap." The bloggers' real concern is that they'll lose their recently acquired just-like-old-media access to PR dog-and-pony shows and the snack room at CES. It used to be bloggers bragged about not needing those things, and not being corrupted by them. The guy at TechCrunch's gadget blog weighs in: "Will Denton's kids grow up? Absolutely." Then he posts a photo of a douche box. When I grow up, I want to be just like him.

In its February issue, Wired promises "The Untold Story" of the iPhone. But as typical for the magazine, they instead deliver a rehash of things you mostly already know, spread over 3,336 lavish words. Here, instead, are 378 words, in bullet points, containing the truly juicy tidbits Wired writer Fred Vogelstein was able to turn up. My favorite? That when Steve Jobs gets really mad, he doesn't scream. He stares.

Can you legally create MP3s from your CD collection, or not? That's all we want to know. News has circulated since early December that the recording industry believes it is illegal to rip your music library . The genesis of this waas an RIAA lawsuit against a chap for tossing ripped files into his Kazaa sharing folder — not, mind you, for actually ripping the files off a CD. We ridiculed the Washington Post for making this mistake, and were prepared to laugh derisively when it ran a correction. But a Wired blogger argues, at length — 745 agonizing words — that the RIAA still thinks CD ripping is illegal. Here are the 100 most essential words.

Helicopters. Hot metal print. Faked photos. Police scanners and running engines. Even if you're not a journalism wonk, outgoing Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger's recap of his years in the golden age of newspaper reporting is an engaging read, all 2,963 words of it. If you just want the dirt, I've pullquoted Steiger's dead-bird story, plus the time he asked for a helicopter to do some reporting. Does Pajamas Media have one of those?

I don't expect anyone other than Jeff Jarvis to read Gawker's 1,047-word memorandum to employees in its entirety. I've cored out the important part — the numbers with dollar signs — below.

Blogoscoped, Phillip Lenssen's authoritative Google blog, just posted its 2008 predictions for Larry and Sergey's money machine. And if you're up for trudging through his 2,701 words, by all means, go. For the rest of you, here are the bullet points.

The libertarians are coming! But don't let a Republican explain it to you. Instead, crazy fun local lefties the San Francisco Bay Guardian report on the Ron Paul phenomenon. I've culled some easily-absorbed bullet points from the lengthy article.

A handy rebuttal to the science-challenged handwringers you're stuck with through New Year's Day. Slate's Green Lantern columnist Brendan Koerner has boiled down the facts on global dimming. It turns out to be global brightening, except in India and China. I pared Koerner's piece even further to one snappy paragraph.

Digg has hired an investment bank in hopes of selling the company for at least $300 million. Digg users, in case you haven't heard, aren't happy about this. One of them, Tamar Weinberg, who ranks among Digg's top 50 users measured by success at getting stories to the site's homepage, has penned a rant on why anybody would be dumb to buy Digg anyway. Here's the 100-word version.