The Fake Steve Jobs (a.k.a. Daniel Lyon) is on a book tour promoting his book Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, A Parody, and he made a stop at Kepler's Bookstore in Menlo Park. What makes this book reading different from others is that they managed to get the real Steve Wozniak to show up, and give the introduction to Fake Steve Jobs. I'm in the front row, sitting next to the editor of Valleywag, Owen Thomas, who is liveblogging the event. A couple rows back from me is Brian Lam of Gizmodo. A couple of other names and websites were tossed into the air before the event started and I'm assuming a lot of the crowd here probably reads alot like a who's who of the blogosphere. I don't really recognize them, I'm just here to listen to Fake Steve Jobs, and hopefully take some pictures and video.
Wozniak gives a really geeky introduction to Fake Steve Jobs. I mean really, really geeky -- he's talking about hotel rooms and breaking down the room numbers down into base pairs, and then does a bit of numerology breaking down Daniel Lyon's name into 4 and 12 with 12 breaking down into 1 and 2, and all of those are powers of two. At the end of Woz's intro, he gives a FSJ a real Apple turtleneck which he purchased from the Apple Company Store. FSJ is reluctant to wear the turtleneck, as he is afraid the Apple lawyers might say he's hitting too close to the mark.
FSJ is totally geeked out by this intro from Woz, and wants a picture of him and Woz together. There are plenty of cameras in this room, and things pause for a minute as they get that picture. FSJ ranks this event pretty highly -- just under the birth of his kids.
Fake Steve Jobs launches into how it all started, as really an exercise in learning how blogs worked, and he didn't want to do a normal blog, and he was inspired by British magazine Private Eye, which had a "secret diaries" feature. He was a big Apple fan, a switcher from Windows to Mac OS X. Stuff would happen in the news, and they wouldn't cover it in Forbes, and so he started wondering "I wonder what Steve Jobs thinks?" and styling the blog like that. He did it for 6 weeks, deleted it and then someone said "dude, what happened?". So he put it back up. He put a book proposal together at Christmastime, and then scrapped it later to start to put a storyline together involving the SEC and the iPhone. Trying to keep his identity as FSJ from his Forbes co-workers was pretty tough, especially when the bonus for discovering the identity was a free iPod. However, his Forbes co-workers were clueless, even when they figured out that FSJ was in Boston, they never realized it was him (who was living in Boston) at the time. It ends with the outing of FSJ, and Forbes adopting FSJ onto their website (and now includes the super annoying ads that run across the screen).
FSJ then begins the question and answer section, and relates the story of how he tried to outrun the Valleywag outing, and how the New York Times managed to uncover his identity.
His favorite blog entry is the one on the day the iPhone shipped, called "The Day the World Changed", because he got to satirize a lot of it, and he really finds the whole camping thing ridiculous. Woz pipes up at this point and relates a story how he printed up a bunch of numbers for people and handed out tickets so people wouldn't lose their place, and how he got to ride around Valleyfair Mall in the middle of the night on his Segway while camping for the iPhone.
Someone asks FSJ if he was also Fake Larry Ellison, and his answer is no. What happened was that he needed to finish the book, and so he rented a place in Maine to finish it, and set up one of his friends who had always wanted to blog as a user for his blog as the Fake Larry Ellison. He also offers Woz a place on his blog as a guest blogger as well. During this time, he was outed, so he had to come back from Maine and drive back to Boston to deal with it.
FSJ says that he's never been contacted by Apple for any reason.
Regarding journalists, he is one, so he's sort of self-loathing in the way that he portrays them and how CEOs respond to them.
Owen Thomas of Valleywag asks "How do you know when you're being you, and when you're being FSJ?"
He thinks of it as being sort of like Triumph, the Comic Dog. He did some posts recently on Scoble and EMC, and he's pretty sure that Real Steve Jobs probably doesn't think about Scoble or EMC at all. The real person who does Triumph, "Rob Smigol in real life is this really quiet, nerdy soft-spoken gentle guy, not very funny. Stick a dog puppet on his hand, and he goes mental." "I'm really not like Fake Steve, but it comes out."
He's only had one person help him out on the blog. He lets go of characters as he gets bored of them.
Someone comments that his Nancy Pelosi is spot on, and wonders if he's ever met her, and the answer is a loud "Ha" followed by an explanation that he totally made that up.
FSJ loves the interaction between the commenters and the entries -- and he intentionally makes mistakes just to see the commenters' reactions to them. His real job is covering Linux, so he gets comments sometimes, and pulls off a mocking voice as to how Linux people generally respond to his columns.
Did FSJ invent frigtard? No, he thought he did, but apparently someone had beat him to it.
He's supposed to meet bike-helmet girl on this trip, and will probably meet her in San Francisco at the reading at Books Inc. in the Castro District tomorrow.
Last question: Did he actually get a raise at Forbes? No, he didn't, but he has some kind of deal worked out in relation to the traffic that he gets on Forbes.
Flickr: Fake Steve Jobs (a.k.a. Daniel Lyons) and Steve Wozniak.
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