The Silicon Valley tech gossip site Valleywag is having a field day reporting on a fake Steve Jobs, who of course has his own blog. The blog lampoons the real Apple chief executive with headlines such as “Jesus didn’t go to college either,” “On being obscenely wealthy,” “Just think of them as iAds” and “I feel like Martin Luther King.”
CNBC columnist Jane Wells comments: “The true author is the object of much speculation inside the tech circle. The only clue we have is that ‘Fake Steve’ claims he (she??) ‘invented the friggin iPod,’ a jab at the real Steve Jobs. On the blog Fake Steve rips on everyone.”
Says Brian Lam of Gizmodo, the gadget blog, ” … Fake Steve Jobs has always been very decent to me. He returns my e-mails, and is timely and cordial about it. I bought some t-shirts and a mug. I like his work, like we all do.” But Lam says he can’t help but wonder who the faker really is.
Mike Schramm of The Unofficial Apple Weblog or tuaw.com says when the fake Steve Jobs emerged, he wanted to find out his identity too. But many of his site’s readers disagreed, saying it didn’t matter who the author was as long as he wrote “strong, insightful (and often hilarious) pieces about what Apple was up to …” Schramm says he now agrees with his readers, and won’t try to unmask the Jobs doppelgänger. “FSJ is much more fun as FSJ himself, not some writer pretending to be him. And so we’re pledging, to you, not to write any more speculation, ever, about FSJ’s identity,” Schramm writes.
Still Valleywag is doggedly pursuing the author’s real identity. So much so that the fake Steve complained about “invasions of privacy [by a Valleywagger] that may or may not have crossed over the line of legality but definitely fall outside the boundaries of what most decent civilized human beings consider to be appropriate behavior.” The fake Steve Jobs suggested he had private detectives and lawyers on the case.
Upon reading that, Jim Goldman of CNBC sarcastically remarked, “Hmmmm. That definitely doesn’t sound like the man himself. ” Goldman has also developed a theory of about the author’s identity:
- “I’ve got a sneaking feeling that [Valleywag Editor Owen] Thomas and [Publisher Nick] Denton are behind all this. If not directly, then indirectly. I tried reaching Thomas this morning but he wasn’t answering his cell phone. But if this is all about driving traffic to Valleywag, or hitching Valleywag to the Fake Steve Jobs gravy train, it’s working. Valleywag goes after Fake Steve Jobs. Fake Steve Jobs protests. Loudly. Valleywag writes about it more. And then we all follow the drama. Pretty cool.
(Photo credit: Paul Sakuma, AP)