Kibu-ki theater.

• Author: Malanowski, Jamie
• Position: Political Booknotes

I KNEW THE INTERNET EMPEROR had no clothes the day my esteemed former colleagues at Time published a cover story about how the Internet was liberating creative people from the arrogant publishing houses and record companies by enabling them to self-publish or self-produce and reach audiences directly. The news hook was that Stephen King was going to e-publish his next book, a reasonable experiment that ultimately failed. But the lead character in this cover article was an animator who ran a Web site called doodie.com. Every few days, he would posta new 15-second cartoon that showed a stock character--a cat, a dog, a mad scientist--taking a dump. That was it. Time's tough-minded, hard-headed journalists--professionals I respected and admired!--had seen the future, and it involved cartoon cat poop. At that moment, I was grateful that I had squandered all the money I had been underpaid over the years and had nothing in the market, because I knew it was a house of cards.

Inside the Cult of Kibu and Other Tales of the Millennial Gold Rush, by Lori Gottlieb and Jesse Jacobs, aims to tell the story of those years in the words of the people who were out there in the trenches, drinking the Kool Aid by the vat. Gottlieb was the editor of Kibu.com, a Web site devoted to the preoccupations of teenage girls, or as they put it in the glittery, overheated Silicon Valley Girl-speak of the era, a "digital lifestyle brand" that will be "Yahoo! for Gen Y with an estrogen slant" (One can't help but recall Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon remarking, "The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.") Jacobs is vice president of content at IFILM, called the Net's leading online film company. This is a good title, but I cannot speak to the scale of measurement. I'm sorry to say that they have taken a great idea and turned it into a mishmash of a book. Kibu contains a lot of entertaining stories, many of them telling and insightful, about the era's delusions and incompetencies and lifestyle excesses. But most of the book is an oral history, with one person's memory following another's, and the effect is rather like brunch at a mediocre dim sum place where too much time passes before the next good dumpling appears.

I say most of the book is an oral history because Kibu is really a melding of two books: Gottlieb's account of her three months at Kibu.com, chopped into chunks to which have been appended the oral histories. Gottlieb's sections are really funny, and I hope...