Dan Lyons strikes again! Is his name mud?
August 6th, 2007 by Todd Van Hoosear
So The New York Times revealed on Sunday that Dan Lyons is the man behind the Fake Steve Jobs blog and Twitter personas. Dan Lyons, the man behind the famous “Attack of the blogs” Forbes cover story in November, 2005.
The true test of the power of blogs will be how quickly his name becomes mud–whether he ends up flipping burgers, riding his infamy to new journalistic lows, or continuing to drive Forbes into tabloid territory.
Forbes, prepare to see the last two subscriptions from the blogerati disappear–but what else will happen? I can’t wait to find out.
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August 6th, 2007 at 8:47 am
Or, is Dan doing a public service? As I wrote back in November of 2005, he claimed, in an interview with Sam Whitmore, to be doing a public service.
An excerpt:
The call was quite amicable, but Dan was on the defensive right from the start–he’s very aware of the beating he’s getting in the blogosphere: “I just want to make it clear upfront that it’s not that I or Forbes are against blogs,” he said in the interview. “I just think that a lot of [the reaction online] is … either intentionally misinformed or just people misread[ing] the article.”
He then proceded to give an analogy of e-mail spam: A few spammers are ruining things for the rest of us. He admitted that “blog attacks are a tiny sliver of the blogosphere.”
But then he went right back on the attack. Even legitimate bloggers, he said, present a big risk to companies and their brands. “[Bloggers] have a lot of power, and a lot of companies … live in fear of these guys.” Why? Because there are no rules of engagement like there are in the MSM.
Sam didn’t hold back. He criticized Daniel for focusing too much on the negative aspects of the story. Dan admitted that the story lacked some of that perspective–the “to be sure” paragraph as it’s sometimes known (i.e., and this is my quote here, “to be sure, some bloggers are not evil muck-rakers with nothing but the total annihilation of your company’s brand in mind”).
August 7th, 2007 at 2:50 pm
Speaking of tabloids, bye bye WWN: http://tinyurl.com/2ja63u
August 8th, 2007 at 9:21 pm
Well, Elvis’ alien bat-boy babies may find a home at the Wall Street Journal under the new ownership