'Fake Steve Jobs' Ends His Parody Blog
Date : 11 Jul 2008 Category : Technology
NewsFactor NetworkDaniel 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 titled, "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.
Lyons said he had grown tired of his fictional creation, but mainly he was worried about making fun of a real person whose health had been a recent topic of speculation. Jobs said he was healthy in response to a reporter's question last month.
"I tried transitioning to other voices, like Jerry Yang's, but it just didn't work," Lyons said, referring to the embattled Yahoo chief. "It seems clear that people reading the blog wanted to read Fake Steve or nothing."
For Jobs's online doppelgnger, the lights are dimming on a creation that once captivated the technology world. Publishing pseudonymously until an article in The New York Times revealed his identity last summer, Lyons wrote with insight and hyperbole about Jobs's tyrannical moodiness at Apple and the fictional antics of other high-profile technology figures, including Steven Ballmer of Microsoft and Larry Ellison of Oracle.
An industrywide guessing game as to the identity of "Fake Steve" ensued, with the real Jobs and Microsoft's Bill Gates weighing in.
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 a Hollywood production house, Media Rights Capital....