The once-mysterious blogger known as “Fake Steve Jobs” is turning off his iPhone for good.
Daniel Lyons, the former Forbes magazine journalist who wrote the blog The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs for the last two years, is moving on with his professional life and creative pursuits. In a final entry Wednesday entitled, “I’m sailing away,” the author, who is moving to Newsweek as a technology columnist this fall, said he was shutting down the popular parody of the life of the Apple chief executive and starting a new blog under his own name.
Mr. Lyons said that he had grown tired of his fictional creation, but mainly he was worried about making fun of a real person whose health has been a recent topic of speculation. (After a reporter for The New York Times asked about his lean appearance at a conference last month, Mr. Jobs said he was healthy.)
“I tried transitioning to other voices, like Jerry Yang’s, but it just didn’t work,” Mr. Lyons said, referring to the embattled Yahoo chief. “It seems clear that people reading the blog wanted to read Fake Steve or nothing.”
For Mr. Jobs’s online doppelgänger, the lights are dimming on a creation that once captivated the technology world. Publishing pseudonymously until an article in The Times revealed his identity last summer, Mr. Lyons wrote with insight and hyperbole about Mr. Jobs’s tyrannical moodiness at Apple and the fictional antics of other high-profile technology figures, including Microsoft’s Steven A. Ballmer and Oracle’s Larry Ellison.
An industrywide guessing game as to the identity of “Fake Steve” ensued, with the real Mr. Jobs and Microsoft’s Bill Gates weighing in.
Mr. Lyons translated the appeal of his blog into a novel, “Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, a Parody,” published in October by Da Capo Press, and he is writing a screenplay based on the book for Hollywood production house, Media Rights Capital. Unlike the book, Mr. Lyons said, the screenplay will feature a generic chief executive.
-- NYTimes
3 comments:
Seriously? I thought Jerry Yang owned the blog. Just shows how perceptive I am.
Interesting blog by the way. I'm always pleased to find blogs that aren't picture-centric.
B.H.
Thank you! Same here. I'm pretty much sick of cam-whoring blog sites.
I'm embarrassed that you're more updated about Malaysian politics than I am.
The true testament to a Malaysian/Sporean blog's quality and wit is that you don't garner much traffic. Because the vox populi enjoy mind numbing material.
It's a sad way of consoling yourself but at least you have more discerning readers.
B.H.
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