It had to happen sooner or later, and it has: The identity of Fake Steve Jobs--the proprietor of the hottest, funniest blog in technology--is no longer a well-guarded secret. Fake Steve isn't Andy Ihnatko or Leander Kahney or Harry Shearer or any of the other people who previous muckrakers thought they'd identified as the blog's true author. The New York Times figured out that he's Daniel Lyons, a reporter for Forbes who has also blogged under his own name.
Lyons does work in the Boston area--FSJ had been the subject of an IP-capturing sting operation that suggested he was in Beantown--but he's not, as speculation convincingly had it, based on some of the phrases he used, a Brit.
Fake Steve--er, I mean Lyons--has fessed up, and Forbes has announced that FSJ's blog will become a Forbes.com feature. I'd like to think it'll be a successful one, but it's not entirely clear whether a FSJ who's been robbed of his mystique will attract nearly as much attention or manage to be nearly so entertaining. It's easier to say nasty things about important people when nobody knows who you are, and while I don't know Lyons, it seems inevitable that he'll consciously or unconsciously self-censor future posts at least a little.
On the other hand, being unmasked as Anonymous didn't seem to hurt Joe Klein's writing career. Maybe Lyons--who we now know is a funny guy, and who has a book coming out as Fake Steve--should simply retire his alter ego at the height of its fame and blog at Forbes.com as the real Daniel Lyons. I'd sure read whatever he had to say, and so would a lotta other people--at least for awhile.
Full disclosure Fake Steve has blogged about me and linked to this blog, and I had my own theories about who he might be. Which, I now know, were utterly wrong. And no, I won't tell you what they were...