Bloggasm

Updated below

When it comes to political satire, pseudonymous blogger Jon Swift has been adept at transferring irony and sarcasm to the printed word — not an easy feat given the absence of nonverbal cues and voice inflection. In the online world, he was revered by blogs on both the right and the left. And despite his infrequent postings, he was still able to gather quite a readership, with thousands of inbound links, regular visitors, and RSS subscribers (see an interview I conducted with Swift over here).

Why then — at the height of his popularity — did he disappear from the web completely? His last post was published March 15, and in it he gave no indication that he would be going on a blogging hiatus. Since that last post, dozens of his readers have entered his comments section to express their worries. “It’s hard to come to an optimistic conclusion about this disappearance,” one commenter wrote. “I still hold a little hope that he’s gotten a richly deserved book deal but can’t say so or something positive like that, but I’m increasingly afraid he got hit by a truck or something.”

Unfortunately, Swift went to great lengths to hide his identity, at one point even turning down a Huffington Post guest-blogging gig just so he wouldn’t have to reveal who he really was. Given this, it’s incredibly difficult to investigate his current status and find out if he’s still out there somewhere.

Below I’m going to lay out what we know about Swift and his disappearance and hopefully others will eventually chime in with new information. Feel free to provide any input into the comments section or to email me at simon.bloggasm@gmail.com if you know anything.

Though it would seem that Swift departed from the web on March 15, there’s evidence that it occurred much later. If you check his Facebook mini-feed, for instance, you’ll see that the last time that he engaged in any activity on the social networking site was actually April 13. On that day, he joined a Facebook group called “Free the Jefferson 1!”

There’s evidence that whoever Swift is, he lives and/or works somewhere within New York City. The first indication of this is his Facebook profile, which lists that as his location.

But I’m also reminded of an incident that happened in December. Swift emailed me to ask if I was interested in participating in his “best of the blogosphere” post by submitting a link to one of my articles. I replied to his email with a link to a specific post of mine. Five minutes later, I noticed in my sitemeter logs that he had clicked on the link from his email — it was very obvious that he had been the one who clicked on the link.

Curious, I checked out his IP address. He was surfing the internet from a law firm in New York (unfortunately I can’t remember now which one). Wondering if I could maybe guess his identity, I went to the website of the law firm to see how many lawyers it had so I could maybe figure out who he was. But that path quickly went cold, because the law firm in question had somewhere around 200 lawyers.

Given his chosen expertise (if he is, indeed, a lawyer), I can certainly see why he didn’t want his real name affiliated with partisan political blog posts. There’s no doubt that he was trying to protect his career and possibly his personal life.

So what does this say about his disappearance? Did someone come close to giving away his identity? Was he afraid it would negatively affect his career? Did he, as that one commenter suggested, get hit by a bus?

That’s what I’m hoping to find out. It’s my goal to have this blog post either draw out Swift himself or someone who knows of his condition.

So Swift, you jokester you. Where are you?

UPDATE: Melissa McEwan from Shakesville published a post today after having a conversation with Mr. Swift:

Well, let me assure everyone that he is fine. I just spoke to him at Swift HQ and can confirm he’s not trapped under anything heavy and hasn’t been hit by a bus—he’s merely busy, nose-deep in an alarmingly modest proposal, natch.

Hmm. I don’t doubt McEwan’s reporting, but it still leaves me wondering why Swift hasn’t been responding to emails, facebook messages or his worried commenters. Very odd.