It didn’t take much digging to discover that the website promoting the tale (www.thisman.org) has been registered to a woman man in Italy since January 2008. By itself, not enough to discount the claims (although This Man is reported to have been a recorded phenomenon since 2006).
A little more tunneling, however, quickly undermined the credibility of the source. According to Logicpunk at Metafilter, “The registrant of thisman.org, Andrea Natella, is the director of guerrigliamarketing.it, an advertising agency that uses non-conventional communication techniques, like the creation of fictitious events or campaigns reaching the limits of legality, through which they ‘**** the market in order to enter it‘.”
So there it is, a perfectly creepy, subversive, cross-media narrative, unravelled because a marketer failed to spend an extra seven bucks a year to mask the WhoIs information through the domain registrar.
Posted here, because I called it: http://ikepigott.posterous.com/ever-dream-this-man-2
(big props to Todd Denis for tracking it all down.)
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