14 months of fame ends: Fake Steve Jobs is unmasked

The 'fake Steve Jobs', blogger/satirist/Apple irritant, has been unmasked. The New York Times put an end to the ruse on Sunday, publishing the identify of the blogger who claimed over the past 14 months to be blogging the innermost thoughts of the mercurial Apple CEO. So, who is "Fake Steve"? A Valley insider? A shareholder activist with a dodgy iPod? Nope and nope. He's Daniel Lyons, a 46-year-old Forbes tech editor who, evidently, holidays in Maine, owns a necktie, and has never met Jobs face-to-face. In fact, he tells the Times, he has zero sources within Apple. "I had to go out and get books and biographies to learn about a lot of the back story,” he says. His secret leaked out when he sought out a book deal to cash in on his faux-Jobs persona.

And so, one of the bigger mysteries of the tech blogging world ('does anybody bother to vet their stories?' remains unsolved) is clarified. Lyons explains he started the blog a year ago just as some high-profile CEOs were beginning to catch blogging fever. After their underwhelming initial posts, Lyons thought it would be fun to invent a CEO blog that actually said something, rather than simply spouted PR puff. He hit upon a fictitious version of Jobs, the most polarising figure in the tech world, adopting an irreverent "I'm-Jobs-deal-with-it" tone, and taking jabs at Linux advocates, Google, Bill Gates and Larry Ellison too. Anybody who took themselves seriously in the tech world -- VCs, mobile operators, the downloading public -- was caught in the crossfire.

In his "outed" post, Lyons reflects on the upside of his unmasking, saying:

One bright side is that at least I was busted by the Times and not Valleywag. I really, really enjoyed seeing those guys keep guessing wrong. For six months Dr. Evil and Mr. Bigglesworth put their big brains together and couldn't come up with the answer. Guy from the Times did it in a week. So much for the trope about smarty-pants bloggers disrupting old media. Brilliant.

But Fake Steve isn't leaving quietly. He is taking some time off, then vows he'll "come back, badder than ever". But when he does, he'll just be Daniel Lyons, East Coast blogger. Good luck with the book sales, Fake, erm, Daniel.