Dan Lyons is a cruelly funny man. He's been a journalist and fiction writer for decades, but Lyons is best known for the anonymous Fake Steve Jobs blog he launched in 2006. Writing from home at night, Dan vented his frustrations as a Forbes writer by inventing a fictional Steve Jobs character. Fake Steve said everything about the tech industry's titans that Dan wasn't allowed to print in Forbes. (Check out "I love to fuck with car salesmen" and "Eric Schmidt's Serenity Prayer.")

Today, it seems Dan has taken down a post, for the first time any of us can remember. From most reporters, I'd consider this typical pointy-haired management, what can ya do, etc. But seeing Dan Lyons self-censor his own honest work makes me wonder if I'll be able to stay true to my own after I leave Valleywag's free-fire zone next month.

What's changed for Lyons? Simple: This past summer, Newsweek hired him away from Forbes. After a long series of talks with both old and new editors, Lyons shut down Fake Steve Jobs and started a new blog, Real Dan Lyons.

Yesterday he blogged a potty-mouthed, Fake-Steve-style rant about Yahoo's PR people yanking his chain in his official Newsweek reporter role. Today that post is gone. Dan's not answering his cellphone or email today, so I have to presume it was his Newsweek editor who made him take it down. Certainly, I've never seen Lyons wake up in the morning and rush to undo his previous night's typing.

Here's the timeline:

• A month ago, Yahoo's PR reps put Dan on the phone, as a Newsweek reporter, with Roy Bostock, Yahoo's chairman.
• Bostock swore up and down, over and over again, that Jerry Yang was not being challenged as CEO of the flailing, sprawling company he co-founded more than ten years ago. A side note: A lawyer Yahoo PR put in touch with Lyons also swore that a lucrative deal to have Google sell ads for Yahoo was going to make it past antitrust regulators, no problem.
• Yesterday: Whoops. The Google deal never happened, and Yang has been forced out of the CEO seat.
• On Monday, Lyons posted to his own blog, blasting Yahoo's PR people as "lying sacks of shit."
• Today, that post is replaced with a 404 error. I dialed Dan's cellphone and got a robotic message saying this customer is not accepting calls.
• We can't think of a single Fake Steve Jobs post that Dan redacted while at Forbes. Can you?

I’d never dealt much with Yahoo before, and I was stunned by their PR operators — they’re really an unsavory bunch. During that same reporting this crack team of lying sacks of shit put one of Yahoo’s attorneys in Washington on the phone to tell me, over and over, the true “inside story” of what was going on with the Google deal, which was, he informed me, that the deal with Google was a sure thing, definitely going to happen, no way in hell is the deal not going to happen, there are no real objections from the regulators, they’re fine with it, the objections from advertisers are not an issue, blah blah blah. Then that deal fell apart. And now Jerry Yang is out on his ass. The take-away: Do not believe a word that Yahoo says. Ever.

And in case Newsweek's handwringingly sanctimonious editors make Lyons pull the blog post in the morning, here's a screenshot:

For good measure, Lyons also slapped Kara Swisher, the thoroughly self-involved AllThingsD editor who broke the story about Yang's departure.

It reads, "Have a passion for really great products!" The exclamation point kills it for me. Add to that: He's not even in Facebook's Apple network. His wife, Laurene Powell-Jobs, and his daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs both have Facebook profiles, and they aren't on his friends list. Sadly, 75 Apple employees, drawn to any electronic hint of their cult leader, are.

I'm left wishing Dan Lyons had been the one to pull this stunt. The original Fake Steve Jobs would have made this Facebook page so convincing I would have believed it. And gladly.

So what is Guy's new book about? To be honest, I have no idea. I didn't read it. I didn't even pretend to read it. Guy is craven enough that he doesn't really care whether I read his book or not. As he put it to me, all he wants is a famous name to put on the cover, and pretty much everyone turned him down and so he had to resort to calling me, and so, fine.

So this is it — my official endorsement. Reality Check is by far the best book ever written about the Valley. It's an important and necessary work, one that should be required reading in every business school in the country. I wish this book had been around when I was starting Apple in my garage back in 1976.

There's a really super-important lesson, yet one that so many people overlook, especially here in the Valley. Anyway, if these incredibly super-obvious things aren't already super-obvious to you, then you probably need to read a book like this and have someone like Guy Kawasaki teach you how to start a business in terms that a child could understand.

Namaste, poorly informed wannabe business people. I honor the place where your imbecilic gaze and my incredlibly wise words become one. Much love. Peace out.

Lyons says he had intended to bring The Secret Diary to Newsweek, but lost heart after Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference in June, when it was apparent to all who saw him that the real Steve Jobs had lost a lot of weight.

So it wasn't because Newsweek ran afoul of Apple's top flack, Katie Cotton, in bringing Lyons on board, as the more conspiratorial rumors have suggested. Or it was, but then Lyons was introduced to Robot Steve Jobs and decided it was better to submit than resist the inevitable extinction of humanity at the hands of attractive, well-designed and verbally-abusive overlords from the Cupertino company. The reprogrammed Lyons now reports that Jobs looked better at the recent iPod Nano rollout event, and he may start blogging again.

(Photo by Mark Coggins)

Dan saw His Steveness in person at Apple's developer conference in June and had a sincere personal crisis over Jobs's obvious illness. He felt wrong mocking a guy who might not be alive the next morning. Because in case you can't tell, Dan Lyons is one of Jobs's biggest fanboys. Huge. (In photo: Dan getting his own fanboy love at Macworld Expo 2008 from stock analyst Charlie Wolf.)

Apple retailers have been given Justine Ezarik’s phone number and told to refuse her service. She calls 35 stores and they all tell her they’re sold out. Best part is where Justine doesn’t recognize the Talking Heads song on the hold music. The song she’s listening to (”This Must Be the Place”) was released the year before iJustine was born. Sigh. The fact is, try as I might, despite everything about her, I can’t make myself dislike iJustine. I’m not sure what it is. I think it’s her eyes. Watch the video again and check out the way she does the “I’m shocked” thing over and over again. She does this look all the time and the effect is to make her appear to be constantly startled by everything around her, as if she’s just fallen to earth from some other planet and everything she sees or hears is new and strange and shocking. Plus there’s that pink lip gloss. Much love, Justine. And hey — call me. Okay? Daddy wants to buy you some classic rock.

You think it’s a coincidence that just as the Journal was breaking its story about hedge funds hiring private detectives, Markoff at the Times happened to run into some “people close to Mr. Jobs” who knew about Steve’s surgery and were willing to tell John Markoff all about it? Right. None of this is happening by accident. Apple PR is playing the Valley press corps, and the Valley press corps is going along with it, like they always do. Not so the hedge fund guys, who have real money at stake and don’t care if someone like Katie Cotton yells at them. Frankly I’d be shocked if the hedge fund guys didn’t already have people posted 24×7 at the Stanford Medical Center. (Note that “people close to Mr. Jobs” do not speak to reporters without permission, ever.)

“Problems abounded,” and “the Web site was sluggish,” and on and on and on, plus 13 uses of I, me, my or mine this week. See the whole angry GoatScreed here. Money quote: “In my tests, using two Macs, two Dell computers and two iPhones, I ran into problem after problem.” If only Apple had brought Walt in early on the design and conception of MobileMe, and let him have some say in how the system was set up, well, this whole ugly mess might have been avoided.

Jobs's scary-skinny appearance at an Apple event earlier this summer had everyone talking, including Lyons. While there turned out to be a reasonable explanation for Jobs's frail frame — aftereffects of surgery for pancreatic cancer — and people with Jobs's specific ailment have a high survival rate, Lyons concluded that posing as a guy recovering from cancer just couldn't be humorous for much longer.

Hence his attempts to write as Fake Jerry Yang and a Google insider. None of the alternate personae really took. Just as well. Some thought that after the New York Times unmasked him last year, Lyons's blog wouldn't be as good. Instead, he just got better. As Lyons proved on his book tour for Options, his first Fake Steve novella, he is riotously funny as himself. Goodbye, Fake Steve Jobs; hello, Real Dan Lyons. Where have you been hiding?

It's been suggested to me that I might take some time off this summer and focus on myself for a change. You know — do some yoga, take a calligraphy class, put on some weight

Fortunately, Fake Steve's lined up series of "heavy hitters" to take over the blog for the summer — Jerry Yang, Jony Ive, Mark Zuckerberg, Carl Icahn, J. Allard, Walt Mossberg, Robert Scoble, and Jonathan Schwartz. FSJ writes:

I know you'll miss me. I'll miss you too. Not really, but that's what I'm supposed to say, right? Ha! I'm joking. I really will miss you.

In perhaps related news, journalist Dan Lyons is leaving Forbes and taking Steven Levy's job at Newsweek.

Leander Kahney: It's not nice to shout at people. It makes people gun-shy and miserable. Management by fear alienates good workers. Only certain personality types can withstand it. It's better to motivate with carrots than sticks.

Fake Steve Jobs: Leander, you are a hopeless pussy. This kind of attitude is why you're a hack at Wired and not running your own multi-billion-dollar company. Carrots, not sticks? You must be joking.

• The lowest level goes to bloggers and reporters from sites with few readers — they get onto the show floor for free, but don't get entry into the all-important Steve Jobs keynote.
• The standard press badge, pictured above, gives access to all the floor and the special media section of the keynote.
• The truly special press have the VIP ribbon (left) affixed to their badge. We spotted one on John Markoff of the New York Times, Newsweek's Steven Levy, and Walt Mossberg of the Walt — sorry, Wall Street Journal. A Macworld veteran told us they're reserved for "geezers."

  When the doors opened for press to enter the keynote, broadcast media were let in first — but Mossberg used his clout to cut in line. "I'm VIP," he said, waved his badge and walked past. The rest of us had to deal with security guards with a small Apple logo emblazoned on their black shirts like we were paparazzi waiting to get into a restaurant where Britney Spears was eating.

  We didn't rate VIP status, but we had something better: Fake Steve Jobs!

I'll even admit I was taken in by Lyons's artfully drawn fable, which made a point about the unseemliness of Think Secret blogger Nick Ciarelli agreeing to settle a lawsuit with Apple by shutting down his site. When a panicked reader pointed out the Fake Steve posts to me, I frantically IM'd my boss asking if we should cover the news. He tartly reminded me that Fake Steve Jobs was a parody blog. I felt foolish, but not angry. Creating suspension of disbelief is part of what great fiction is all about. Now I'm just wondering if I should've asked for Options for Christmas.

Fake Steve Jobs is Wired's Leander Kahney. Former editor Nick Denton's meticulous analysis of FSJ's prose leads him to believe a fellow ex-Brit is the pseudonymous Steve Jobs blogger. It isn't just wrong, it's patently ridiculous to Kahney's colleagues — the guy's just not mean enough.

Drunk employee crashes 365 Main's colocation site. A tipster uses credible inside knowledge of 365 Main's operations to pass new editor Owen Thomas a timely, credible story that turns out to be completely wrong. The story delivers 145,000 pageviews worth of wrongness. Lesson: Even autistic sysadmins can be full of baloney.

Mark Zuckerberg cashes out. A rumor published at midnight on a weekend during the holiday season gets sprayed all over the Net inside of an hour. Wall Street Journal reporter Kara Swisher shows up at my door in person to tell Owen he's a frigtard.

This is Novell's prayers answered — a "reporter" who writes exactly what they tell him to. Vaughan-Nichols is a lazy genius: He's figured out a way to earn his salary by cutting and pasting content no one's going to complain about. In fact, he's probably the least headache for his own editor, since none of the companies he writes about ever call to complain that he got it wrong. Here's an idea for publicists: Stick a giant Creative Commons license atop all your press releases. See how many grateful bloggers take the hint and finally, finally run your talking points unsoiled by any of their error-prone original reporting.

As I read through the posts, I noticed a number of themes consistent with another writer I know. References to Natali Del Conte, Nick Denton, and, crucially, Armani sunglasses.

The brats at the Armani store didn't even know about my Armani Bono Red sunglasses. They're the same shades I wore on the Elevation tour, priced at a reasonable $145, and 40 percent of the take goes to help your brothers and sisters still suffering. Plus if you're a blogger and getting kind of wrinkly around the eyes, they're a lot cheaper than plastic surgery. My good friend Nick Denton in New York bought a pair for one of his gang who's a bit over the hill. The man looks fantastic now. Fox TV called him on to talk about Google for 15 minutes. God's truth. It was the shades.

And yet he even looks like Bono! Here's a screen cap from a recent Boing Boing TV episode — Boutin is towards the end if you want to see his take on lolcats.

Could he be responsible for these directionless diatribes about Red products and how important Bono is? Well, they've both got the self-important part down. I pinged Mr. Boutin to see what was up.

BulldogPup83: Hey Paul, did you read Fake Steve Jobs this weekend?
ArmaniGlasses: Read it? I fucking wrote it.
BulldogPup83: I knew it!
BulldogPup83: Natali Del Conte and your silly sunglasses totally gave you away.
ArmaniGlasses: FOX cancelled on me though.
ArmaniGlasses: I think they found out I'm a libertarian which effectively means a Republican, and their whole idea was to have some whiny liberal blogger from San Francsico on to go WAAAHHHHH GOOGLE IS TOO POWERFUL.
ArmaniGlasses: What was your question again?
BulldogPup83: Oh nothing. Just saying hi.
ArmaniGlasses: Natali gave me away? I'm going to kill her.
ArmaniGlasses: Oh wait, she'll do that goddam scream if I do, aieee.
BulldogPup83: I know you think she's awesome and all, but do you really think that Bono would know who she is?
BulldogPup83: He barely knows who the other members of U2 are, never mind Natali Del Conte.
BulldogPup83: total giveaway
ArmaniGlasses: and you giiiiiiive yourself awwaaayyyy, and you giiiiiive yourself awaaaayyyyy, and you give ...
BulldogPup83: Thanks for the help, I appreciate your time Mr. Boutin
ArmaniGlasses: Wow, I haven't been called "Mr Boutin" since the last time the NY Times mentioned me.
BulldogPup83: I suspect you can have me killed. Must be respectful.
ArmaniGlasses: Xeni on line 1 here, gotta hop
ArmaniGlasses: toodles

This is how they get you. When a reporter has a personal axe to grind, he or she goes out and finds three people who agree. In journalist-math, three's a trend. Here's my edit of CNET's take: I'm insanely greatly jealous that Dan Lyons has a book deal. Don't buy the book! I'm so tone-deaf to good writing that I can work at CNET all day. So are three other people. Namaste, Dan. I honor the place where your book and my rave review for The Wall Street Journal — have you heard of it? — become one.

Steve, don't get too pissed off, eh? Think of this as payback for the time you stayed at my guest cottage — you know, the one with the bathroom wall where everyone gets to sign their names in magic marker. How do you think I felt when I went to use the loo and found you'd scrubbed the entire wall clean — Clinton, Tutu, Jagger, Mother Theresa, all gone — and repainted it sparkling white with just the word "Steve" dead center in perfectly hand-lettered Myriad Sans Bold? It was beautiful, my friend, beautiful. But kind of fooktarded.

In the end, Judge Fogel dismissed the suit because it was based on three-year old statements, which Apple successfully argued were too old to consider in court. Fogel did allow room for a Lyons sequel, however, telling plaintiffs they could file the suit again if they could show Apple executives lied after July 30, 2003.

Here's the back story. Marc Bodnick, a cofounder of Elevation Partners, the private-equity firm behind Forbes, where Lyons has a day job, suggested plugged-in matchmaker Brooke Hammerling to make high-level introductions in the Valley. This move, insiders say, confounded Lyons's publisher, Da Capo Press, which had its own PR operation, and momentarily threw plans for the party out of joint. Hammerling vehemently denies there was any friction. Da Capo ended up handling press for Lyons's book tour, and Hammerling and the book publisher threw a joint party at Frisson, the restaurant part-owned by Facebook board member Peter Thiel.

Thiel, alas, didn't show, but San Francisco's tech press corps turned out in droves, and in the case of videoblogger Natali Del Conte, kickass boots. Also crowding the joint: a bevy of Lyons's Forbes colleagues, past and present, and backers from Elevation Partners. Digg board member Brett Bullington no-commented his way through the evening. An unusually buttoned-up Hammerling, when she wasn't schmoozing, was ringing up copies of Options for Lyons to sign.

Fireworks, we thought, were inevitable when Lyons got on stage with Kawasaki, whom he's savaged on his blog. Turns out the worst thing Fake Steve said about Kawasaki was that he was a motorcycle designer, something Kawasaki found amusing. Our promised fireworks turned into kiddy-safe Independence Day sparklers.

Something to know about Dan Lyons: The man is as hilarious in person as in his best blog posts. He's quick, succinct, and dead-on with his observations. He is, as they say in Detroit, "wicked smaht." Also, he has a huge hard-on for Steve Jobs. Like, major mancrush. Lyons describes Jobs as a "son of Zeus born to a mere mortal" and other outrageous claims, which makes it seem like he's taking the piss out of Jobsian worshipers. Not true. Lyons really is an Apple fanboy who believes in the infallibility of His Steveness. Jobs is, to Lyons, "the most interesting person alive."

Which seems like the most boring thing he could say. But here's a secret for you: That awe is what makes the blog work. Lyons clearly venerates Jobs, without which his Fake Steve blog might come across as mean-spirited, not a satirical celebration.

One question kept coming up: How was Lyons treated by people who he slammed in the blog? He admitted to being worried about their reactions, but said that there have been few negative repercussions. He brought up Bike Helmet Girl, an early target for Fake Steve due to her appearance in a photo taken at a Yelp party last year. He initially ran the photo with a derisive caption. "Bikey" wrote in, a correspondence was born, and her character became a recurring figure in the blog. Lyons finally got a chance to meet her at a book signing last week, and spent a good minute in the Fake Steve character, dreamily recounting their meeting. (Lyons never revealed the lingering question about Bike Helmet Girl: Why was she wearing a bike helmet in the first place?)

I asked him about an article he wrote for Forbes, "Attack of the Blogs," a cover story which he railed against anonymous blogging as an abhorrent practice. Has being an anonymous blogger changed his mind about such practices? He admitted that he would like to "get a do-over" and rewrite the story. He likened his attack to writing a story focusing on spam as an example that all email was bad. "Tomorrow, Valleywag will call you a hypocrite," Kawasaki warned him.

Other Fake Steve revelations:

• Someone named "Katie Cotton" — the same name as the head of Apple PR — ordered a number of Fake Steve T-shirts from CafePress. (Brad Stone asked the real Cotton about the purchase. She declined to discuss any clothing purchases.)
• 
  
• The front row was filled with a line of Apple employees, one of whom brought an OS X programming book as light reading during downtime.
• 
  
• Kawasaki asked Lyons and Stone if they thought they would always be known as "Fake Steve" and "the guy who busted Fake Steve," much like Eddie Murphy will always be known as Donkey from Shrek. Lyons and Stone's reactions suggested they thought Kawasaki was nuts — and then started talking about how Donkey wasn't really representative of Eddie Murphy's career.
• 
  
• Brad Stone broke the news that Lyons was Fake Steve while Lyons was on his way to a Maine vacation with his wife, a vacation he had promised would be work- and blog-free. Stone's call to Lyons while he was en route changed all that. During their conversation, it was revealed that Lyons is the father of two-year-old twins. Stone and his wife are expecting twins soon. As their call was ending, Lyons promised Stone that he would buy two voodoo dolls of the twins and poke them at 2 a.m. random nights, to make up for Stone ruining Lyons's vacation.

• Tonight, in Mountain View, Forbes writer Dan Lyons meets with former Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki for a Q&A session hosted by LinkedIn. Will there be mud wrestling? We can only hope. [Upcoming]


• A panel on semantic search is taking place at Pillsbury Winthrop in Palo Alto. Former Powerset CEO Barney Pell is scheduled to speak. Take the chance to ask him about the rumored reasons he's no longer CEO of the hyped-up search engine. [VC Task Force]


• Hey, it's election day! The only big contest around here is for Mayor of San Francisco, which is going to be Gavin Newsom again. (Since when does one elect a God-Mayor? - Ed.) Still, though, go out and vote. It's your civic duty!

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