A New York Timesstory has revealed the blogger behind the ultimate character blog - Fake Steve Jobs - is Forbes senior editor Daniel Lyons.
The mysterious writer has used his blog, the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, to lampoon Mr. Jobs and his reputation as a difficult and egotistical leader, as well as to skewer other high-tech companies, tech journalists, venture capitalists, open-source software fanatics and Silicon Valley's overall aura of excess.
The acerbic postings of "Fake Steve," as he is known, have attracted a plugged-in readership - both the real Mr. Jobs and Bill Gates have acknowledged reading the blog (fakesteve.blogspot.com). At the same time, Fake Steve has evaded the best efforts of Silicon Valley's gossips to discover his real identity.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Daniel Lyons, a senior editor at Forbes magazine who lives near Boston, has been quietly enjoying the attention.
"I'm stunned that it's taken this long," said Mr. Lyons, 46, when a reporter interrupted his vacation in Maine on Sunday to ask him about Fake Steve. "I have not been that good at keeping it a secret. I've been sort of waiting for this call for months."
Mr. Lyons writes and edits technology articles for Forbes and is the author of two works of fiction, most recently a 1998 novel, "Dog Days." In October, Da Capo Press will publish his satirical novel written in the voice of the Fake Steve character, "Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, a Parody."
In a blog post on the Fake Steve blog Lyons credits Brad Stone at the New York Times for discovering his secret identity.
My cover has been blown. Guy named Brad Stone, who works for the New York Times. Have you heard of him? Well, tip of the hat to you, Brad Stone. You did the sleuthing. You put the pieces of the puzzle together. You went through my trash, hacked into my computer, and put listening devices in my home. Now you've ruined the mystery of Fake Steve, robbing thousands of people around the world of their sense of childlike wonder.
Apple 2.0 points out that Brad Stone found style similarities between the Fake Steve blog and in Lyons' Floating Point blog and his upcoming novel, Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, a Parody. This was part of Lyons' undoing. It also isn't easy to keep a secret for very long especially with the Fake Steve Jobs character getting so big. FSJ was even name dropped by Bill Gates at the Gates-Jobs meetup where Gates joked that he was not Fake Steve Jobs.
The big question now is what happens to the blog now? Will it still be a big traffic draw? Scott Karp blogs that the Fake Steve Jobs blog is apparently now going to be published on the Forbes.com website. Forbes itself also has an article about the FSJ blog moving from blogspot to Forbes.com. Duncan Riley blogs at TechCrunch that "Half of the fun related to the blog has been not knowing who the author was." Knowing the real author does take some of the fun out of FSJ so it is difficult to say whether or not this will be a big draw for Forbes.com. Still a character blog from Forbes impersonating a CEO of a major technology company seems hard to completely ignore. Maybe there will also be more interest now in what Daniel Lyons himself has to say in his real columns. For more discussion of the Fake Steve reveal check Techmeme and Megite.
