Fake Steve, We Hardly Knew Ye

It could just be the latest prank within a prank that Fake Steve Jobs specialized in but this has the ring of truth: Fake Steve Jobs -- aka, Dan Lyons -- is "sailing away."

I know you'll miss FSJ. So will I. But rest assured, Fake Steve is not really going away. He's just taking on a new form. As Jimi Hendrix once said, If I don't see you no more in this world, I'll meet you on the next one, but don't be late.

Lyons says he's going to blog under his own name, starting maybe even this week.

FSJ was a geniune phenomenon in both news and humor. Lyons seems to capture the essence of the reclusive and inscrutible Apple chief with a true reverence, only slightly veiled by a wee bit of sarcastic excess. One could imagine Real Steve Jobs secretly loving the bashings Fake Steve gave to the digital figures he deemed pompous and overbearing, like Goatberg (Wall Street Journal's Personal Technology editor Walt Mossberg), the BeastMaster (Bill Gates) and Monkey Boy (Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer) while choosing to ignore all the none-too-subtle references to his own imperiousness and eccentricities.

Sure, the joke began to wear thin, and that Andy Kaufman riff might have been his jump-the-shark moment. But we always enjoyed reading FSJ. His feed was required reading (we actually have a section called that in our Google Reader, which kind of doesn't say great things about the feeds in other sections).

And, more seriously, FSJ was still one of the relatively small handful of personal blogs which catapulted its writer to deserved global fame and perhaps even fortune. And this is what the doubters of this medium still don't quite get: for all the chaff that is inevitably generated when everyone has a printing press, remarkable and unpredictable voices will emerge that could not have otherwise -- and the world will be much better place.

by John C Abell for Wired.com

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