Fake Steve Jobs Is Back

Dan Lyons at a San Francisco book signing in 2007 with tech podcaster Veronica Belmont and Bike Helmet Girl, a recurrent character in the Secret Diary.

Steve Jobs may not be back to work yet, but Fake Steve is.

Fake Steve Jobs (aka Newsweek columnist Dan Lyons) has started blogging again.

Over the weekend, Fake Steve made a series of off-color jokes about Steve Jobs’ recent liver transplant. The posts are classic Fake Steve  — sick, tasteless and LOL funny.

Unfortunately, it may not last.

In the latest post, Fake Steve pretends that Jobs received a partial liver transplant from NYT gadget reviewer David Pogue. Pogue happily donated half his liver in gratitude for everything Jobs has done for his career.

However, Lyons said he might not keep it up.

“Still premature,” said Lyons in an email. “I just can’t resist the liver stuff. Lots of reasons to not do it. For one thing, I’m starting a tech blog for NewsWeek in a few weeks, and won’t have time to do both.”

The new blog will be called Techtonic Shifts.

Lyons launched the hugely popular Secret Diary of Steve Jobs in 2006 and managed to write it anonymously for almost a year before being outed by the New York Times. He parlayed the blog into a book Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, and later, a new job as a writer for NewsWeek (He was an editor for Forbes while writing as FSJ).

Even the real Steve Jobs admitted to being a fan. “I have read a few of the Fake Steve Jobs things recently and I think they’re pretty funny,” Jobs said at the D: All Things Digital technology conference.

But in July 2008, Lyons discontinued the blog after seeing how sick Jobs had become. “I saw how he looked at WWDC and it was like having the wind knocked out of me. I just couldn’t carry on,” he told Ars Technica. In the meantime, Lyons has continued to blog on his own site, the Real Dan Lyons, but it hasn’t achieved the same success as Secret Diary.

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