Of course, another commentator by the name of Robert Scoble says he’ll be joining up with Fat Camp to set up Fat Camp TV, so take it for what it’s worth.

Though he hasn’t responded on his blog, Scoble, who’s currently in Paris, did confirm via Twitter before announcing his general lack of availability. "It’s true," he tweets, "I’m at PodTech until January 14, 2008. After that? The deal hasn’t been signed yet, so we’ll announce it on January 15th."

Scoble also denied PodTech was financial trouble, as reported at TechCrunch.

Detractors are quick to note (or, dig in) that this is a much different tune than Scoble sang both in August and late October. In response to late summer rumors that PodTech was "a shitbag salad" and that he was leaving, Scoble, rather bluntly, denied both.

In October, Scoble denied both again, this time taking direct issue with the Fake Steve Jobs (Forbes editor Daniel Lyons) reporting that "Scoble was planning to bail in January" and that PodTech was failing.

"This is total, 100% bull####," Scoble wrote. "Not even deserving of a response. I’m not leaving PodTech. When, er if, I am you’ll read it here on my blog."

Lyons, er, Fake Steve, was quick to hop on the told-you-so bandwagon, and to suggest that Scoble doesn’t follow his own advice about "radical transparency" in blogging:

"Come on, Robert. Walk the walk, baby. Be transparent. Stand naked before us. Tell us who’s offering what. Show us the term sheets. What’s that? You’re shy all of a sudden?"

Ouch. Well, I guess we’ll all find out in January.
 

So, I thought I’d post my referer log to show you who is sending the most hits. FSJ is still 7x more clicky. Too bad Nick Denton!

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Last week I was getting an iced latte at the new Peets in Half Moon Bay. I was wearing a Blogger T-shirt. Old school. There a lady came up to me and asked “is that the Fake Steve Jobs T-shirt?”

I remembered that FSJ published his blog on Blogger and figured the Blogger logo was confusing this lady who assumed it was FSJ’s logo. Blogger, as you know, is the blog service from Google which was started by Evan Williams, er, evhead.

Anyway, I explained to her that the logo wasn’t really Fake Steve Jobs, but rather the tool he published with. Demonstrates that there’s a lot of brand power in Fake Steve Jobs.

As she walked away she said “I love Fake Steve Jobs.”

Truth be told I love FSJ too. Why?

Well.

1. He’s funny, even when he attacks me.

2. Everytime he links he sends boatloads of traffic. I don’t know why I love that, but it makes me happy to see that Fake Steve Jobs has boatloads more readers than Valleywag does (Valleywag says they have tons of traffic, but they don’t click on anything. I’ve been on both sites dozens of times and FSJ’s audience clicks at 20x the rate that Valleywag’s does).

3. He’s been talking about me looking for a job lately which brings a big smile to my face although someone shoot me if I ever take a CEO job. That doesn’t sound fun to me at all. Lucrative, yes, but not fun and I simply wouldn’t be good at that.

4. He’s a lot better writer than I am.

5. He’s a lot better speaker than I am.

6. He has a cool job at a big business magazine (Forbes).

I wish I could get FSJ on my show. Something fun would be to do a little debate about something. Remember, the guy who writes Fake Steve Jobs is actually a Forbes magazine employee, Daniel Lyons. He was the guy who wrote a cover article back in 2005 about how blogs sucked. Everyone who thinks Daniel is such a great blogger should go back and read that article and compare his beliefs back then with FSJ today. Oh, sorry, that’s not funny.

I wonder if Daniel still feels the same way about blogs attacking brand value now that he uses a blog to attack other people, companies, and things?

Or, we could be more professional and debate industry topics like the state of Apple’s brand value or whether the Amazon Kindle is well designed or not.

Hmmm, maybe we should just do a panel session at a conference and debate about how much value Facebook is going to destroy due to horrible PR? That might be entertaining.

Facebook has the most controlling PR department outside of Apple and it sure is in the middle of a PR crisis right now.

I feel ambivalent about the troubles Facebook is having right now. Personally I’m having lots of trouble with Facebook but Facebook doesn’t care about people who have more than 5,000 friends unless they can figure out a way to monetize us. Everytime I look at Facebook I am reminded of how little Facebook cares about me. So, I care less and less about Facebook every day.

My phone number is on my Facebook entry. Interesting that Facebook could use me to answer the community’s concerns. I’d give them hours of video time on my show. But they only seem interested in talking to big-brand journalists and I’m not interested enough to pull out my Fast Company business cards to get them to pay attention. They should invite 40 bloggers who are lower on the TechMeme leaderboard than me and just have a conversation about the mess they are in. But they’ll never do that because they are so damn controlling about what they say and who they say it to.

For completeness, here’s Facebook’s official answer to the latest troubles with its Beacon advertising scheme.

Anyway, that was a really long entry to say that I’d rather read Fake Steve Jobs than log into Facebook lately. At least with FSJ I get entertained as I get bashed. With Facebook I just am reminded that there’s more than 1,000 people that I can’t help because of Facebook’s lame scalability issues. MySpace or upstart Zude are sure looking better and better. Just get that OpenSocial platform done and let’s get on with it!

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Fake Steve Jobs: Have You Heard Of oPtion$?

By hanging out with Nippon worshipper and fellow tech titan Larry Ellison, spooning with Sting, cruising with Bono, and firing people, of course. It’s all part of a day’s work in the three act play that is Options, the novel by Fake Steve’s alter ego, Forbes senior editor Dan Lyons.

The novel stems from the exploding popularity of Fake Steve’s blog, The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs. Once an under the radar blog churning away in relative silence, it began attracting a higher profile audience, thanks to the ersatz CEO’s witticisms and scathing observations of the tech industry at large.

The real Steve Jobs, as well as Bill Gates (affectionately known as ‘Beastmaster Bill’ on the FSJ blog), both count among its readership. After interest in the blog hit a high note, Options began taking form, but not before New York Times reporter Brad Stone outed its anonymous author.

Throughout the fun 248-page romp, in which the more tech-inclined should recognize the real people behind some of the fake names, FSJ throws tantrums, works his Zen mastery on slavering Apple fanboys, and ponders the deeper meaning of the iPhone’s inner workings.

But real life intrudes, as vicious investigators for the feds, and a traitor in Apple’s midst, seek to undo Apple’s, and Fake Steve’s, resurgence as a tech industry titan. Improperly backdated stock options and the celebrity status of Apple’s leader have the forces of government allied against him.

Can he outlast the probe, the betrayal, and a frightening loss of confidence, to get the iPhone to the Apple faithful? You think you know the answer to this, based on real world events, but until you’ve read every word you really don’t.

As a bonus for our readers, we were able to secure some answers from FSJ about the book, himself, and people in his life. Enjoy this exclusive Q&A session with the legendary inventor of the friggin’ iPhone (and iPod) – have you heard of it?

1) The black turtlenecks you wear – humble article of well-made clothing, or a divine right conveyed upon you by the higher power that inspires gadgets like the iPod and the iPhone?

The former. I view my outfit as a form of monk’s robes. The idea is to abolish vanity and express my humility so that I can focus completely on my art. All I want to do is create beautiful objects. That is the only thing I want to think about. Not trivial things like clothing.

2) Which situation would you rather see happen to former US Attorney Kevin V. Ryan: a slow devouring by an endless supply of fire ants, or being subjected to hours of video of Woz and Kathy Griffin in flagrante delicto?

The former. I’ve seen the Woz videos and I swear to you, nobody deserves to see that, not even Kevin Ryan.

3) Hypothetical solution: Richard M. Stallman is drowning. What do you throw to him, and does it matter if what you throw to him instills a childlike wonder in horrified onlookers?

I would throw him a 24-inch iMac. It won’t save him but at least he’ll get to see what a real computer looks like before he goes under.

4) In oPtion$, you noted your management style uses fear and tantrums to get results. How many interns need to be in tears before you reach a higher level of consciousness for the day?

Half a dozen is an average day for me. Anything less than that and I get so antsy that I start firing executives. That’s why we’ve got so many interns at Apple. Phil Schiller calls them cannon fodder. Or, actually, "cannon foddah," because he’s from Boston. Phil has more interns than anyone, purely for sacrificial purposes. He keeps them lined up outside his office like captives on the steps of the great temple of Tenochtitlan.

5) You coined the acronym, Siooma. Why hasn’t this been added to the Oxford English Dictionary yet?

Have you ever dealt with anyone in the book publishing business? One word: Slooooow. It will be there eventually. Give them time.

This is total, 100% bull####. Not even deserving of a response. I’m not leaving PodTech. When, er if, I am you’ll read it here on my blog.

Interesting that not a single blogger called me this evening.

Interesting too that OUR COMPETITORS are the ones who are writing this crap. Thanks guys.

PodTech has suffered personnel issues in recent months. They fired well-regarded video blogger Irina Slutsky over the summer. A week ago, company founder John Furrier left his CEO position with PodTech, a move that made people wonder about the future of PodTech.

As Scoble noted in his response, his phone number is on his blog. People who reported on the story seemed accepting of the hint of PodTech’s passing, so much that no one called him. That’s not a good sign for a company, when a rumor by a parodist comes across as a likely truth.

Fake Steve Outed As Forbes’ Daniel Lyons

I’m pretty sure no one in the blogging world suspected Lyons of taking up the ol’ Blogspot editor and cranking out the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, also known as Fake Steve Jobs or FSJ. But the New York Times put two and two together and added them up to “platform of an online lynch mob, spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel, and invective.”

Lyons recently updated the FSJ blog to confirm the findings by the Times and reporter Brad Stone:

Now you’ve ruined the mystery of Fake Steve, robbing thousands of people around the world of their sense of childlike wonder. Hope you feel good about yourself, you mangina. 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.

Meanwhile, the Times described how the old world of print media, clued in by the forthcoming FSJ book, managed to dredge up a secret that had been the cause of much speculation for about 14 months:

The book, in part, led to Mr. Lyons

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/fake-steve-outed-as-forbes-daniel-lyons-2007-08/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/who-is-the-fake-steve-jobs-2007-07 http://www.webpronews.com/who-is-the-fake-steve-jobs-2007-07#comments Thu, 26 Jul 2007 15:37:05 +0000 WebProNews Staff http://www.webpronews.com/?p=39380 The Web's new favorite mystery has turned dark and a well-known columnist admits he's not who you think he is. The big question: Who is the Fake Steve Jobs?
]]> The Web’s new favorite mystery has turned dark and a well-known columnist admits he’s not who you think he is. The big question: Who is the Fake Steve Jobs?

The Web hasn’t been this enamored with an online personality since LonelyGirl 15, who, we remember, turned out to be a big, big disappointment.

Fake Steve Jobs pens a blog called The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, a parody of the charismatic Apple CEO. The Real Steve Jobs and even Microsoft’s Bill Gates have been known to visit the blog to check out Fake Steve Job’s own brand of scathing techno-geek sarcasm.

The popularity of the Secret Diary resulted in a Net-wide manhunt as not just bloggers, but also major news outfits like The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, BusinessWeek, and Wired all looked to unmask the anonymous blogger.

You know, because there’s nothing to talk about since the iPhone launched.

Their main suspect was Macworld and Chicago Sun Times columnist Andy Ihnatko, who admits to being hounded by all of the aforementioned publications. When asked point-blank, Ihnatko would neither confirm nor deny, a response that aroused even more suspicion. But Inhatko argued:

"Either I’m Fake Steve, in which case I would want to throw people off the scent, or I’m not him, in which case I surely wouldn’t lie about that. "

Which is like that puzzle where there are two doors and two guards and one guard always lies and the other always tells the truth and you have to ask a question to find out which door to take.

The chase reached fever-pitch when the operators of SiteNing.com set a trap for Fake Steve via a link to a bogus iPhone haiku site, from which they could track his IP address, a move Fake Steve called "creepy."

Suspicions again fell upon Ihnatko after Sitening published the address and traced it to Boston, where Ihnatko lives, an event that forced an admission:

"I’m not Fake Steve.

"I’ll even go so far as to spray-paint that statement gold, and cover it with glitter. I say this here and now, without a single wink or ironic note: I’m not him. I had nothing to do with the blog’s creation and have never had the slightest thing to do with any of its content."

Ihnatko posted that at Macworld instead of his blog so that if not true, he’d be in big, big trouble.

Oh well, back to the hunt. Or maybe, not knowing is better at the end of the day.
 

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/who-is-the-fake-steve-jobs-2007-07/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/fake-steve-jobs-hunt-takes-creepy-turn-2007-07 http://www.webpronews.com/fake-steve-jobs-hunt-takes-creepy-turn-2007-07#comments Fri, 20 Jul 2007 17:18:15 +0000 WebProNews Staff http://www.webpronews.com/?p=39277 It has elements of mystery, the tenets of paparazzi defense, and the feeling of a prank gone too far. In a blogosphere-wide attempt to unmask blogebrity – well, it may not be an exaggeration to call him/her a cyber cult leader – Fake Steve Jobs, digital espionage has turned a fun cat-and-mouse game into something Fake Steve calls "creepy."
]]> It has elements of mystery, the tenets of paparazzi defense, and the feeling of a prank gone too far. In a blogosphere-wide attempt to unmask blogebrity – well, it may not be an exaggeration to call him/her a cyber cult leader – Fake Steve Jobs, digital espionage has turned a fun cat-and-mouse game into something Fake Steve calls "creepy."

In the past year, even Bill Gates and Apple CEO Steve Jobs himself have tuned into The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, authored by FSJ, for the witty, insightful, and oftentimes biting commentary.

Meanwhile, in other places on the Net, the mystery of who this author might be has been a titillating one, with theory after theory proposed and then discredited or stamped with a "maybe."

Well known writer about "all things Mac," Andy Ihnatko, with a sense of humor and writing style similar to FSJ’s, has been a crowd favorite. In an IM interview with Valleywag, Ihnatko would neither confirm or deny that he was the Fake Steve Jobs, claiming an ambiguous answer was safer…well, it’s hard to explain the logic, so we’ll just quote him:

If I’m him, I have plenty of reasons to throw you off the scent. If I’m not, I have plenty of reasons to try to convince you that I’m not…Either way, my motive would be to convince you I’m not FSJ, which would only lead folks to assume that my answers prove their belief (whatever it is)…So — again, whether I am FSJ or I’m not — the only real "win" in this situation is to neither confirm nor deny.

Which of course makes him sound guilty, thus proving his point in an MC Escher kind of way.

Whether or not he is or isn’t, directly asking him if he is, or speculating aloud, doesn’t violate any moral or civil codes. The online manhunt, though, took a nasty turn. At Sitening.com, Tyler Hall admits to a little trickery at the FSJ’s expense.

They created a joke website dedicated to iPhone haikus, and sent FSJ a bugged link that allowed them to track his IP address from referrer logs. Hall traced the address back to the Boston area, confirming for some that FSJ was indeed Ihnatko, who works out of Boston.

But whoever FSJ is, he wasn’t happy about it:

[I]t sort of almost makes a person begin to fear for the safety of himself and the people around him. It’s creepy. It’s gross. It’s wrong.

To whatever bit of pond scum is doing this stuff, let me say this: This was fun, up to a point. You’ve gone past that point. Stop.

That was enough for Tuaw.com’s Mike Schramm, who had been gleefully participating in the hunt. Schramm responded to reader response pleading that the desire for anonymity should be respected. Tuaw pledged to not write anymore speculation about it, as "FSJ is much more fun as FSJ himself."

From Fake Steve Jobs’s post, he’s been in discussions with attorneys to determine the legality of what Sitening.com did, and how much, if any, protection is afforded to his privacy.

And that won’t be a question easy to answer. IP addresses, and things on the Web in general, might be considered akin to public space and/or public information. Paparazzi can do what they do because of First Amendment protections of the press – you can take a picture of anything in public.

Phone numbers that are listed in phone books have been sore spots for Internet privacy advocates too, for even though numbers are public information, most don’t want their phone numbers available to people outside of their local areas. A Texan Digg.com user is debating this point with the Michigan police currently.

But IP addresses are not necessarily proof of anything either, even if the RIAA likes to say so in court.

Regardless, chalk this case up to just one more Internet privacy debate to be ironed out in the future, and an illustration of how dangerous the so-called "wisdom of crowds" can be.

  

 

 

 

  

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