The author behind the satyrical Fake Steve Jobs (FSJ) blog postings has been discovered by a New York Times reporter in the persona of Forbes senior editor Daniel Lyons, who was actually quite surprised that it took so long to reveal his online identity.

NY Times reporter Brad Stone is credited with digging up Lyons’ identity, who already has his business blog (signed with his real-life name) hosted at Forbes.com. It was actually an upcoming book written by Lyons that betrayed him, because Stone was able to connect the title and the content of the book with the information given by the book’s publisher (“he is a renowned writer for a major business magazine”) and with the British-tinted writing style found on Lyons’ personal blog (http://floatingpoint.wordpress.com/).

“Well it had to happen. Honestly I can't believe it's taken this long,” wrote Daniel Lyons on his Fake Steve Jobs Blogspot page. After this discovery, the man who impersonated Apple’s CEO with a cynical twist will apparently move his satirical writing to Forbes, the publication that had ironically not only hosted its business blog, but also had plans to grab his FSJ thoughts and even set up a contest whose ultimate purpose was to guess Fake Steve Jobs’ true identity.

According to NY Times, Forbes’s publisher, Richard Karlgaard, had a prize for the winner: “The guessing game has begun. Who is writing it? Send me your guesses. I’ll gladly buy the most expensive iPod for the first to identify Fake Steve Jobs.”

As a consequence of Forbes’s moves, Lyons felt bad and decided to unhide, telling colleagues and superiors that he was behind the whole parody. It appears that his pokes at industry figures, free-software icons or even Apple officials attracted more than 700,000 visitors in July, among them being Steve Jobs himself and Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Apparently, even Lisa Jobs read Lyons’ thoughts, appreciating them as funny: “You don’t sound at all like my father, but your blog is hilarious.”

When he found out about his employee, Karlgaard laughed: “I think it is the most brilliant caricature of an important part of American culture that I’ve seen,” he said. “We’re really proud that he’s one of ours.”

Lyons made fun in the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs at Silicon Valley’s top figures and the companies they run, at tech journalists, venture capitalists and even the Godfather of the open-source foundation, Richard Stallman.

In his latest post, Lyons derides all the attempts that have been made to uncover his whereabouts (including a concerted IP-hunt that turned out to be dead wrong in its findings), but considers that it all had a positive end:

“One bright side is that at least I was busted by the Times and not Valleywag. I really, really enjoyed seeing those guys keep guessing wrong. For six months Dr. Evil and Mr. Bigglesworth put their big brains together and couldn't come up with the answer. Guy from the Times did it in a week. So much for the trope about smarty-pants bloggers disrupting old media. Brilliant. My only regret is that we didn't get a chance to see Bigglesworth take a few more swings and misses.”

Lyons is currently on vacation in Maine, but says he plans to return next week to quench Apple fans’ thirst for more parodies:

“Apple faithful, here in our darkest hour I know what you're thinking: What's next for FSJ? Well, I'm taking a few days off to sit in a lake and do some yoga and meditation and non-thinking. Then I'm coming back next week, badder than ever, with a new sponsor- my homeboys at Forbes.com.”

According to NY Times, Lyons said he invented the Fake Steve character last year, when a small group of chief executives turned bloggers attracted some media attention. He noticed that they rarely spoke candidly. “I thought, wouldn’t it be funny if a C.E.O. kept a blog that really told you what he thought? That was the gist of it.”