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.
