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Fake Steve and the power of blogs

By now, anyone who isn’t living in a cave probably knows that the blogger behind Fake Steve Jobs has been exposed as Forbes writer Daniel Lyons. If you need to find out more, you can read one of the eight thousand posts about it on Techmeme. I’m not all that interested in finding out FSJ’s secret identity — in fact, I was kind of hoping he wouldn’t be found out.

What I find really fascinating, like Anil Dash of SixApart and my friend Joey deVilla from Global Nerdy, is that Daniel Lyons is also the guy who wrote the Forbes magazine screed about blogs not so long ago. Does that make him a hypocrite? Perhaps — although I would argue that, like many magazine writers (or newspaper writers for that matter) Lyons likely took a stance for the article that he knew would be controversial, as a rhetorical device, and may or may not have actually felt that way personally.

In any case, that clearly didn’t stop him from seeing the power of having a blog. As Anil puts it: “The benefits of blogging for one’s career or business are so profound that they were even able to persuade a dedicated detractor.” And Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 notes that Lyons clearly felt compelled to do something more creative than Forbes allowed him to do, and as a result he is likely to benefit from it — at Forbes’ expense.

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