Steve Jobs, Apples Chief Executive has been impersonated by an anonymous blogger for the last 14 months. But the anonymous blogger has been outed by the New York Times, and it turns out that he is Daniel Lyons who is a senior editor at Forbes.

The ‘Fake Steve’ as he is known, has been attracting a pretty big readership which even includes the man himself Steve Jobs and even Bill Gates who both have admitted to reading fakesteve.blogspot.com. Fake Steve has been evading Silicon Valley’s reporters and gossipers who were trying to discover his real identity.

However, Fake Steve wasn’t even in Silicon Valley. Daniel Lyons who is the senior editor at Forbes magazine could be found new Boston and has quietly enjoyed all 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.”

The funny thing about this whole thing is that Daniel Lyons had written the hit piece on blogs last year called Attack of the Blogs on Forbes website. Lyons has admitted that being Fake Steve has become addicting and fun. Fake Steve would receive about 50 emails a day, many including ideas for new posts. Fake Steve said that he was received more than 700,000 visits last month.

“Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective.”

“Mr. Lyons said he invented the Fake Steve character last year, when a small group of chief executives turned bloggers attracted some media attention. He noticed that they rarely spoke candidly. “I thought, wouldn’t it be funny if a C.E.O. kept a blog that really told you what he thought? That was the gist of it.”

Now that Daniel Lyons has been outed by the New York Times it is going to be hard for him to talk about certain things. Although he doesn’t mind being caught he has posted this on his blog:

“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. My only regret is that we didn’t get a chance to see Bigglesworth take a few more swings and misses.”

You can also read the original New York Times article called ‘Fake Steve’ Blogger Comes

Tags: Fake Steve, Steve Jobs, Apple, New York Times, Bloggers, Daniel Lyons, Forbes

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