When Forbes Magazine’s Daniel Lyons launched his Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, he can’t have forseen how popular it would have become. It’s certainly up there with the creme de la creme of fake blogs, taking a loving stab at the heart of Silicon Valley. Lyons is currently giving Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang even more of a slaying than he’s already getting elsewhere by allowing the beleagured exec to be ‘guest blogger’ for a week.

Fake Blogging isn’t always so successful for the real author. Take ‘Fake Richard Dawkins’, for example. I first became of aware of him on Thursday last week when The Guardian’s Technology Editor Charles Arthur sent out a Twitter message saying “ooh, Twitter is officially godless – @Richard_Dawkins in the house. Hope he didn’t listen to Moral Maze last night”. I must point out that at the time he wasn’t calling himself ‘fakeDawkins’ (UPDATE: apparently Twitter have forced him to become ‘RichDawkins’ now), it was ‘Richard_Dawkins’.

Now, I have to confess to never having read any of The World’s Most Famous Atheist’s works, but his arguments in interviews have intrigued me so I thought I’d follow him. I think I also liked the idea of an old man who was still forward-thinking enough to sign up to such a new medium as micro-blogging.

Over the weekend Fake Richard shared tales of having a nice meal with his wife, preparing for the Edinburgh Festival and… well, that was pretty much it. However, by the start of this week he was acting rather oddly. For a start either he was talking about himself in the third person or (gasp!) he wasn’t actually Richard Dawkins at all! Yes, it appears this mysterious impostor was simply a Christian trying to “preach peace” to fans of Dawkins, a man who apparently “wants to divide people more than they already are for some reason, and that sucks”.

Funnily enough, Fake Richard’s 1700 followers (built up in just a few days) quickly either jumped ship (his followers more than halved overnight) or stuck around to argue with him about what he’d done. And he’s still there, arguing pointessly with the people who’ve stuck around.

So, what did Fake Richard do wrong? Well, firstly he lied. If you’re going to pretend to be someone at least be honest about it. Fake Steve Jobs has never claimed to be the actual Steve Jobs. It’s obvious from his writing (and besides, he wrote a book based on the blog – the real Jobs rarely so much as sneezes in public away from offical Apple events). That’s why he’s still doing his thing nearly two years since he began while Fake Richard is simply shouting to the people who stuck around to watch the car crash.

That brings us to his second fault – he carried on once he got found out. Once he’d said his piece did he really think many people would stick around for more? They’d been lied to; some of Real Richard Dawkins’ fans probably felt tricked and hurt. If he’d have got the followers together, preached his little message of peace and then got the hell out it would have been a nice little meme for a week. Instead, he’s decided to keep the account open. What does he expect to get? A book deal?

Third fault – he didn’t even try. If he’d have written in the first person once he began his diatribe then maybe we’d have believed that Richard Dawkins had gone mad and/or completely changed his viewpoint. It might not have worked for long but it might certainly have got a few of Dawkins’ fans questioning their own beliefs. Instead, he suddenly started talking about Dawkins in the third person. Everyone immediately smelt a rat and nothing Fake Richard could do after that would make people take his message seriously.

Finally, Fake Richard’s last fault is that he chose Twitter to get his message across. Yes, the novelty of ‘Richard Dawkins on Twitter’ is a nice idea, but tiny 140-character posts make it difficult to get a long message across. Hence Fake Richard had to…

continue sentences over several…

posts in order to make his…

point.

Which is silly. He should have just started a proper blog.

So, if you’re going to start a fake blog, make sure you’re a little less ‘Richard’ and a lot more ‘Steve’.