Joey Skaggs is at it again, only this time, he really is selling a load of bs.

Skaggs, for those of you that don’t know, is a professional media hoaxster. I have written about him from time to time as he invents new exploits that continue to fool professional journalists around the world. He has come up with some zingers, gotten on CNN and other network TV and covered by the wire services and major metro newspapers dozens of times.

Skaggs is a character, no doubt. His hoaxes aren’t hastily constructed – some of them take years of preparation and dozens of volunteers who act out various roles. Laying the trap takes time too as he builds up a phony history that he uses later to confuse his reporters. I’ve known him for about 15 years and some of his media pranks are priceless. He set up a computerized jurisprudence system called the Solomon Project that found OJ guilty, a bordello for dogs, a portable confessional booth that was attached to a bicycle that he rode around one of the Democratic conventions, a miracle drug made from roaches, a company buying unwanted dogs to use them as food, and more. Every one of his setups is seemingly genuine, which is how the media fall for them and report them as real. Only after his clips come in does he reveal the wizard behind the curtain and come clean that it all was phony.

His latest project is a bit more tangible, and luckily for his potential journalist marks, something that they can cover without having to worry about looking too foolish later on. It is an analog watch with a sound chip that moos. As in a cow. Or more appropriately, a bull. He calls it his “Universal bs detector watch.” When you are in the presence of someone who is telling you a tall tale, or some other unlikely truthiness, you press the button and the watch flashes and emits the moo, along with another sound that you might recognize. It is actually a fairly attractive watch, although somewhat bigger than I’d like for my taste. You can order one online here.

Of course, given Skaggs’ nature, one might doubt that placing an order will actually get the goods, but Skaggs assures me that he isn’t a criminal and will gladly ship watches as promised.

He sent me a DVD of two of his legit appearances on ABC’s 20/20 and an A&E special hosted by one of my all time favorite people, James Randi, (who devotes himself to debunking various myths and pseudo-science quacks).

Skaggs has appeared before in his many “disguises” (some are so awful that you wonder what the reporters were thinking when you see them), but these two appearances he was playing himself, and telling the reporter why he does what he does, and how he gets away with his hoaxes so often. Watching these should be part of any j-school curriculum.

What impressed me from watching these old clips was how hard it is to get the media to admit their mistakes and issue a retraction after Skaggs comes clean. Many of you know that I write for the New York Times. And when I have had a minor factual error in my article. I was impressed with how quickly my editor got those posted, and how the Times treats these corrections on their Web pages afterwards – the notation is at the top of the page, and the correction runs at the bottom of the article.

But Skaggs’ events are more than minor factual errors. He is the centerpiece of their reporting, and it is amazing how little reporters investigate, in some cases ignore, the clues that he liberally sprinkles around for anyone to pick up. This is Skaggs’ genius, and why he continually gets his hoaxes on the air and in print.

Most of the news media don’t cover Skaggs when they realize that they have been had – in some cases, they merely remove the piece from their archives, as if they never ran it. This isn’t right.

One of the challenges of the Web is how easy it is to rewrite history, or present something that is factual when it is a bold-faced lie. How many of us believe what we read on Wikipedia, or when we Google something, and take it as the gospel truth? At least on Wikipedia, you can view the prior revisions of a particular article if you are really interested.

Skaggs shows us that we have to be more skeptical and dig deeper to get at the facts. But he also shows us that trusting the Internet for our main source of information comes at a risk that this information isn’t properly vetted. It is something we all need reminding from time to time. And speaking of time, I have this great watch that moos that can remind me that occasionally, things aren’t as they always seem.

Those wacky Mainers experimenting with bottles of Coke and Mentos have done it up with a Rube Goldbergish display that can rival anything the Bellagio (or Branson for that matter) can produce.

Check it out here.

The news of the past couple of weeks has me confused; so let me see if I have this straight. MTV is now doing a game where you can play as one of the characters from one of their reality TV shows, a show that employs script writers. These are different writers from the ones who not too long ago were protesting that they weren’t paid enough and had to falsify their time sheets to show that they worked fewer hours.

Then there are people making money off of selling Second Life businesses that sell virtual goods to others inside their virtual world. There are others that auction on eBay virtual items that enable game players to advance to higher levels, and these items are assembled by real low-wage workers who spend their days playing the games to accumulate these virtual items. There are Web pages for real people on MySpace that are fakes, created by fans (or detractors). There are also real Web pages for fake people too, and some of them were created by advertising and PR people who wanted to push a particular brand or agenda. (Insert your favorite joke about ad/PR people here.)

Earlier this month, a reporter for a national magazine was suspended when his employer found out that he was posting praising comments to his own blog under a pseudonym “sprezzatura” which means doing something without apparent effort. His blog was removed by the magazine’s editors.

One of the most popular You Tube videos is about a lonely teenager talking about her life. But it turns out she is really an actress playing a part. I don’t know if they employ script writers or if these writers have to fake their time sheets too. And this has created an entire genre of other popular videos — those people who are tagging their creations with lonelygirl tags so others will view them. Meanwhile, college courses on ethics have already incorporated the whole mess into their curricula.

Then there is a documentary show that ABC-TV aired last week on 9/11, but interwove fictional dialogue spoken by actors playing real people. While it failed to attract any sponsors, ABC promoted it as a commercial-free public service.

Finally, the chairwoman of HP paid professional investigators to make believe that they were reporters to obtain the reporters private phone records, so they could investigate boardroom leaks. One of these efforts involved emailing a reporter a Word document with a Trojan keylogger inserted.

Am I the only one having a problem with all of this? Is it getting harder to distinguish between what is real, and what isn’t, anymore? Remember those simple days of yesteryear, when a reporter for a national magazine who wrote a book of fiction under the “Anonymous” was finally outted to much fanfare? Or magazine covers that had manipulated images were called on their photoshopping? Or how about corporate CEOs that were satisfied with just falsifying their own booking sheets or stock option grant awards? Back then, all we had was the Matrix, which wasn’t real either, but had some fine CGI to entertain us.

Welcome to the new real virtuality. I can absolutely guarantee that I wrote this column with my own hands. Everything else, that’s your own construct.

[A version of this article was published in October in TidBITS.com]

Not worksafe, but hilarious just the same. I think they *are* kidding here. But it is a great way to recruit people for their firm.

Watch the video on You tube

You all remember the fake Vonnegut commencement speech a few years back. This one is the real deal, by the guy who developed the ChicagoCrime.org mashup that has got so many wags in a lather. Adrian has lots to say to recent J-school grads about how our industry has changed and what they can do about it.

David Lee King’s kooky video here is a scream. So how many of the sites he names in the video have you actually touched in the last year? I guess for my 11th anniversary, I should cook up something special.

So thanks to Tara, I found out about watching some great short films at TurnHere.com. The site has a bunch of great personal travelogues mostly about New York and LA, my two former residences, and San Francisco.

I miss the zaniness of LA, the ability to almost always be caught in traffic at random non-rush hour times, the air so thick you can cut it with a switchblade, being amongst Planet Siliconia where the amount of plastic surgery is greater than what people elsewhere spend on their house payments.

But there are lots of special spaces in LA that I frequented when I was there, and the trick is to learn new ones now that I am in St. Louis. This morning I went for a short bike ride in Forest Park, before the humidity had reached crushing levels.

Anyway, the site has plenty to watch and keep you occupied for hours. Some very talented people out making some short films of cool places.