In an interview with the San Jose Mercury News, conducted from his home office in ritzy Atherton, Calif., Guy Kawasaki drops a couple of gems. On defending the poor response to his investments while turning down Valley successes:

Leeching on the success that gadget sites Engadget and Gizmodo and numerous Mac fan sites have had covering live Steve Jobs keynotes, Guy Kawasaki, former Apple evangelist, hopes to pump some page views into his belittled rumor site, Truemors. Kawasaki will be gracing us with his own live coverage of Apple's WWDC keynote event Monday morning.

TIM FAULKNER — Guy Kawasaki, evangelist and entrepreneur, stretches his defense of his ill-received startup, Truemors, to unparalleled proportions in this new video interview by Andy Sernovitz. Not only does he continue to downplay the cost and value of his site: "Before it would cost $5 million to do something stupid. Now it costs $12 thousand to do something stupid. You can do a lot more stupid things," Kawasaki appears to be shifting his defense by indicting venture capitalists willing to fund startups with millions. Of course, Kawasaki has done the same and failed more often than not, but now he knows better. Truemors wasn't a startup, it was an experiment to determine how much capital is needed to build a new company: $12,000 should do since it worked so well with Truemors.

TIM FAULKNER — Guy Kawasaki, former Mac evangelist, venture capitalist, and startupper, defends his new site, Truemors, "by the numbers." We are supposed to take from "the numbers" that Guy was just trying to learn some lessons about Web 2.0 startups, but Truemors does not reveal new lessons, it shows Guy needing to rationalize bad PR, something he hasn't faced so acutely before. Counterpoint to some of Guy's "numbers" after the jump.

Guy Kawasaki, former Apple evangelist and startup investor, now embattled founder of the belittled Truemors and shameless self-promoter, knows how to keep his options open in case the rumor-voting site does not work out. Guy Kawasaki: male t-shirt model. [Photo: Threadless T-shirts]

NICK DOUGLAS — So says Guy Kawasaki in a video interview (embedded below). The man who marketed the first Mac now markets himself on his blog, which is the only blog he regularly reads. In fact, the only way to get read by Guy is to talk about him: "I do, obviously, have my reader set up to check for instances when [blogs] mention me." The self-evangelist even admits to religiously checking his rank on the blog search site Technorati. "I really care... I don't think it's because I'm insecure, because I'm not insecure."

One of the events taking place during Stanford University's "Entrepreneurship Week" — already in progress! — is the Innovation Challenge. Participants have a few days to maximize value from a pad of 100 3"x3" Post-it notes. Prizes include various meetings and activities with Silicon Valley bigwigs, including a hockey game with Guy Kawasaki and "deathball" with Tim Draper. On team of playas has decided to pre-emptively auction the prize on eBay as a way to actually win said prize; the auction lot is a set of ten Post-its, each of which will be a "ticket" to hockey with Kawasaki. No bids yet (auction closes Mar-02-07 01:47:14 PST), but that's potentially a good thing, as the prize may also be won by the team who demonstrates the "most dramatic failure." If only venture capital investing had such a fallback reward.

Sure, we made a little impish fun of VCer Guy Kawasaki's "Golden Touch" in our post about the demise of Filmloop. Apparently this moved Kawasaki to remark disapprovingly on Valleywag's fascist comments policy. What hurts is that Valleywag's name is cut from his post, referred to merely as "a blog." A blog! (Amusingly, many comments on Kawasaki's own post devolved into carping about his site's comment system displaying their email addresses.) Anyway, Guy, we sent you a comment invite, so let's hang out and stuff.

• The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs decides to actually be funny, writing a scathing review of last weekend's debaucherous Yelp party. Aw, Steve, let 'em have their fun. Weren't you ever young and loaded with millions in funding? [Fake Steve]

After official Zooomr evangelist Thomas Hawk got all bitchy at a blogger for criticizing the photo sharing site that employs him, a reader asked me if he was the worst corporate evangelist ever. Not by a long shot! He's just one in a long tradition of awful evangelists. After the jump, we list them all.

• Tuesday night: See if you can't sneak into NetSquared's reception at the Hilton Santa Clara. Bonus points for anyone who tapes a drunk demo and sends it to Valleywag. [NetSquared]

Mega-blogger Guy Kawasaki lays out the Bozofication Aptitude Test that the the Valley's begging for. Browse the ex-Apple-marketer's test and take a point each for anything true about your company. Items include:

Google won't let Americans watch a bomb video. Maybe it would reveal military secrets like "Iraqi bombs tend to go 'boom.'" [Google Video]
A tipster says, "When you delete a photo from your [Blogger] blog, it disappears from your blog. But it does not disappear from photos1.blogger.com, and Google/Blogger says there is NO WAY WHATSOEVER to delete any photo you have ever uploaded that Blogger has stored there." Don't worry, your photo named "elephant_spank_inferno.jpg" is probably too obscure to show up.
Brilliant. A list of disallowed and allowed obscenities and watchwords for Yahoo user names. Rather petty, but a helpful resource for those of you whose biggest thrill this week will be registering "giantmanhood99263@yahoo.com". [Kallahar's Place]
Robert Scoble's son Patrick says his friends think Robert's a porn star. Patrick says the idea of his dad going naked is scary. (Too late, Patrick.) [Mini Scobleizer]
Supr.c.ilio.us quiz: Which lines are from Guy Kawasaki's blog post "How to suck up to a blogger" and which are comment spams? [Supr.c.ilio.us]