"For more than three years, a twentysomething Minnesota woman named Layne Johnson lured thousands of people to her Web site every day with a poignant and brutally honest diary of her life. She was witty, sexually adventurous and intimate with her readers, sharing photos of her travels and exchanging private e-mails and instant messages with fans. She posted messages to other people's Weblogs and created personal profiles at social networking sites. Many readers felt deeply connected to her," reports Michael Bazeley in the Mercury News.
"Now the person behind Layne has come forward and admitted that it was all an elaborate hoax. Odin Soli -- a 35-year-old male entrepreneur and writer, married with two children and living near St. Paul, Minn. -- said he created Layne as an experiment in 'interactive fiction'."
Comment: See http://emitter.dreamhost.com/ for Odin's story, "Layne and Acanit Tell All", and Plain Layne is Gone ("The archive has been taken down and is unavailable"). Ryan Schultz's blog at http://ryanschultz.net/blog/ also has background info.
