“I’m hiding at the back of the room getting slowly drunk with the event’s organiser, an entrepreneur who helped raise a ridiculous sum of money for a business networking site that had projected revenues of precisely zero. His mantra, he tells me, is ‘revenue is the enemy’. It’s not clear what that means, but I have to admit it sounds great.”

Day two of the Whoring. Jesus – by publication day you’ll be looking back, misty eyed, to the days of 1000 word posts on intellectual property and the wrongness of Michael Arrington.

I’ve spent far too much of the day today hunched over a laptop. My neck feels as if it has been spot-welded but I think the results have been worth the pain.

You see, I’m (finally) delighted to announce the launch of an exciting new section of the site. A special place to house all of the the extra bonus features that I’ll be publishing over the next few weeks.

As I think I’ve said before, my thinking is that DVDs have interactive extras – deleted scenes, cast interviews, quirky featurettes – right? So why not books?

My aim is to add a new Book Extra every couple of days between now and publication – and beyond – with new stuff being flagged up on the blog as it’s published.

So what’s the very first Extra? Well now… I knew I wanted to make an extract from the book available to read via the site, to give a taste of what it’s all about. So I spent ages flipping back and forth through the manuscript, trying to decided which section I was happiest with.

Initially I considered something from Chapter 1, as it contains some nice geek jokes and a merciless ad hominem attack that I’m both not proud of and extremely proud of. But it also deals mainly with the first boom, so it’s a bit misleading as an extract.

Chapter 6 sums up the book better than most, featuring as it does a big bath of Champagne, stolen girlfriends, the trashing of a Hollywood star’s flat and – er – Saul Klein and Danny Rimer – but it also gives too much of the story away to be suitable as a sample.

Then there’s Chapter 13, much of which I spend in a cell.

No.

So in the end I decided the best – and most logical – thing to give away would be the Prologue. It’s not the funniest chapter, or the longest, but it’s the most self contained. It was also the first thing I wrote which gives it an innocence and optimism about things that was loooong gone by the end.

So, yes, the Prologue is yours for the downloading. Click the ‘The Book / Extras’ link at the top of any page (or here if you’re lazy) for the PDF link. It’s published under Creative Commons so feel free to share it around or etch it in to the side of a tree or do whatever it is that people do with Creative Commons things.

And now I’m off to rub Deep Heat on my neck. Tomorrow: new visitors and more photos.