Sure, the tech writer has a forthcoming Newsweek blog to promote, named after his column at the weekly magazine. But his decision to lay off on Jobs wasn't a business decision so much as heartfelt concern about the Apple chief's health.

Now, as Fake Steve, Lyon's again cracking wise about favor-currying New York Times columnists begging to donate their livers, CNBC reporters bringing him lattes and, our personal favorite, having a gaunt Jobs brag that "I'm bench-pressing twice my body weight."

We're surprised his bosses at Newsweek are playing along; Lyons killed his personal blog after they demanded he remove a post calling Yahoo flacks "lying sacks of shit." Perhaps the subsequent problems at the magazine's print edition have opened Newsweek's eyes to the promotional power of the Web.

Sure enough, Lyons is already linkbaiting Gawker. Yes, Mr. Jobs, we'd be happy to show up at your house with a camera; just send along an access code to the front gate in case we need to use the restroom.

(Pic by Mark Coggins)

That's how Lyons tells the story:

For two years I was obsessed with trying to turn a blog into a business. I posted 10 or 20 items a day to my site, The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, rarely taking a break. I blogged from cabs, using my BlackBerry. I blogged in the middle of the night, having awakened with an idea. I rationalized this insane behavior by telling myself that at the end of this rainbow I would find a huge pot of gold. But reality kept interfering with this fantasy. My first epiphany occurred in August 2007, when The New York Times ran a story revealing my identity, which until then I'd kept secret. On that day more than 500,000 people hit my site-by far the biggest day I'd ever had-and through Google's AdSense program I earned about a hundred bucks. Over the course of that entire month, in which my site was visited by 1.5 million people, I earned a whopping total of $1,039.81. Soon after this I struck an advertising deal that paid better wages. But I never made enough to quit my day job. Eventually I shut down-not for financial reasons, but because Steve Jobs appeared to be in poor health. I walked away feeling burned out and weighing 20 pounds more than when I started. I also came away with a sneaking suspicion that while blogs can do many wonderful things, generating huge amounts of money isn't one of them.

But wait a second: How did Lyons come to be able to relate this tale in the hallowed pages of Newsweek? Oh, right — it surely had more to do with his blog and his brilliantly sarcastic Fake Steve Jobs persona, not the unnoticed pieces he churned out as a senior editor at Forbes. And then there was the book deal which resulted in Option$: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs. Lyons may not have made money directly from his blog, but he had a fair bit of success off of it. Admitting that would ruin a perfectly good column — and call into question his decision to stop blogging.

Luckily, we know some impolite ones.

Here's Goldman, Wednesday night, getting chopped off at the knees by Newsweek columnist (and former Steve Jobs impersonator) Dan Lyons.

Lyons: "You ever have a girlfriend who cheated on you, and at first it's like, 'I work late'?"

Goldman: "I reported exactly what I was told."

Lyons: "There are two kinds of reporters who cover Apple: The kind who realize they're getting snowed ... and the other kind who suck up to get access and end up getting played and punked, like your bureau chief."

Goldman: "I'm a big boy. I can handle it."

Had CNBC's viewers seen a full-body shot of Goldman like the one above, they would have cracked up just like Lyons did. And he isn't alone. Goldman has a terrible reputation among the Valley's elite which leads some to fixate on his height. "I hate that shrimp," one local tastemaker recently seethed at us.

Such is the dislike for Goldman that a tipster gleefully sent us the snap of Goldman getting a boost during a stand-up shoot at Macworld Expo earlier this month. (He stood on a piece of equipment to make his Lilliputian dimensions look more normal on-air.) It's a subterfuge that might have gone unremarked, if so many people weren't already scoffing at Goldman's credibility.

It is facile pop psychology, sure, but it's hard not to look at Goldman's combativeness — most recently on display in his aggressively incorrect denials of Apple CEO Steve Jobs's ill health — and not see a Napoleon complex, which he exercises at the expense of his reporting. (And his career: CNBC already has a short, angry man in Jim Cramer.)

Ridiculing a man behind his back for his height? So low. Valleywag would never stoop to that level. We'd say it to his face. Even if it hurts our neck a little.

Update: A big man, indeed: CNBC has banned Lyons from the network for life, according to Silicon Alley Insider. Or not, according to Silicon Alley Insider!

See, in the world of Steve, it's all about Steve. When he does go, he will be remembered as a tremendous genius—but also as a petulant narcissist with a grandiose sense of his importance and a sadly limited view of the world around him. Ironically, it is Gates, his archnemesis, who will likely go down in history as the classy one: the one who knew how to exit gracefully, the one who is devoting the later years of his life, and all of his billions, to helping the world's poorest people—and not clinging to his CEO job while he insults reporters and plays petty cat-and-mouse games with Apple shareholders and fanboys.

And this from a man who claims to admire Jobs. Lyons, who stopped blogging last year, seems strangely freed, even in the stifling pages of Newsweek; since he no longer has a sideline pretending to be Steve Jobs, he can say what he really thinks: That Jobs, who had his digestive tract rewired in the course of surgery to treat his pancreatic cancer, and whose health has been troubled ever since, deserves a public evisceration for dodging questions about his illnesses.

Lyons replaced technology writer Steven Levy at Newsweek, whose idea of hard-hitting Apple coverage was to call the iPod a "life-changing cultural icon." Apple regularly rewarded Levy's pieces with exclusives on new gear. Any bets on how many years it will be before Apple gives Newsweek a new iPhone to review?

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.

(Disclosure: Sigh. I write for Slate, which is owned by the Washington Post Company, which owns Newsweek, which sometimes runs Slate articles, but never any of mine that I know about. Happy now? I wish Murdoch would hurry up and buy us all.)

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.)

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?

• March 2006: Cover story "Putting the WE in WEB" praises Flickr, YouTube and others for letting ordinary people create things online — years after these sites became popular.
• December 2006: Trend piece declares 2007 the "year of the widget." It wasn't.
• 2007: Profile of hot new user-generated-content startups.
• February 2007: Interview with Jimmy Wales, who explains why his site Wikipedia is the future.
• January 2008: Story about Flickr users organizing photos for the Library of Congress. Newsweek calls them "the unwashed masses," and I wish there was a way to punch a magazine.

Newsweek had an glowing exclusive review from Steven Levy and New York Times tech reviewer David Pogue wrote up the Kindle soon after it was made public, but it took Mossberg more than a week to review the device. What happened? Another tech columnist told us that Mossberg "was only interested in reviewing it if he could be first. When Steven Levy got it first Walt threw a tantrum." Classy. We also hear Mossberg tried to edge out other reviewers to be first on the iPhone — but got turned down. Incidentally, I still haven't gotten any response from Amazon PR about a review unit. What's up with that? I'll be nicer than Mossberg — maybe.

Newsweek gets one thing right, at least — that the people who are determined enough to endure Second Life's buggy software and sluggish servers are those who are after the virtual sex. But in typical pinched-nose-Puritan fashion, it takes a while to admit it:

The people who are coming to this online universe aren't just socializing, however. They're also doing business, collaborating on research, teaching courses, dating and even having sex.

Linden's in-world traffic tally, which factors in both the number of visitors and time spent, shows that the big draws for those who do return are free money and kinky sex.

The multinational companies are using Second Life in a different way: some are holding staff meetings where avatars representing employees can discuss ideas via instant message, e-mail or Skype, in a souped-up virtual office. Others are using it to connect to customers.

"It had a lot to do with hype," admits [Coca-Cola's worldwide head of interactive marketing] Michael Donnelly.

Now that Newsweek has discovered Second Life, and Wired has uncovered it, can we bury this failed virtual world for good, please? Reuters, CNET, call home your correspondents. Speculators, cash in your Linden dollars. And someone, please, shut off the lights. Whatever's still going on in Second Life is something we don't want to watch.