Those looking for yet still more info can find some of the hunters stories in their own words, photos of my disguise changes from day to day, and the behind-the-scenes of Wired’s challenges and clues.

Sometime next week, we’ll also set up a live chat of some sort to answer any remaining questions that anybody has. We’ll put out word on the Twitter #vanish stream, of course, with details.

Then, this Saturday, on Weekend All Things Considered, in a piece by reporter Alex Cohen. [UPDATE: Here's the link to the piece.]

I’ll post clips if and when I get my hands on them. In the meantime, here’s a recap of some of the other stories about the whole thing, from during and after:

When the contest was launched, a number of hacker sites, reality game-related blogs, and other online forums and bloggers wrote it up, including Grant Hamilton, who made an interesting meta-media comparison to the find-that-guy promotions used by newspapers in Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. Slashdot noticed it, resulting in a fascinating and occasionally funny stream of comments.

Online news services started picking it up. CNET reported on the suspension of my Twitter account, which was eventually lifted after some typically poor Twitter customer service. ABCNews.com dove in with a long piece. Discover compared it to a real live “Where’s Waldo.” A Seattle Times columnist noted my living it up on $17 drinks at the Viceroy in L.A. Kottke.org called it “the case of the missing Wired writer.”

As the hunt started picking up, my editor Nick Thompson appeared on NPR’s national show “On the Media,” as well as local programs in around the country. One of the hunters interviewed Nick and Teeuwynn Woodruff from Lone Shark Games for a podcast, digging for clues.

Meanwhile, while in L.A. I snuck my way into a series of man-on-the-street interviews about swine flu with Amanda Congdon for SometimesDaily.com. She followed up with another video, and then posted some raw footage of the encounter.

As we headed toward the dramatic conclusion, KSL5 TV in Salt Lake City told people to watch out for me at the U.S. soccer game. Syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. mused about getting away in the modern age.

After I got caught in New Orleans, ABCNews.com followed up with a recap, as did NPR’s “On The Media.” CBSNews.com talked to Jeff Reifman, my nemesis, to find out how he did it. Nick and I appeared on CNN.com Live, me with my head newly shorn. Chris Rose of the New Orleans Times Picayune covered the New Orleans angle. Slashdot revisited the whole thing, and the commenters took a few more good shots. I got a little shout out from my celiac compatriots for bringing attention to the condition.

Reifman told his side of the capture at NewsCloud, and then rounded up the contest’s media appearances, which I am now further rounding up.

But left out of all of this, of course, was what the hell I was up to that whole time. For that story, you’ll have to check out the December Wired…

I’ll be describing those 25 days in great detail in the December issue. There were almost daily surprises, both in what I found myself doing, and what I saw (and, of course, failed to see) the “hunters” doing to find me.

But for now I wanted to offer an extended thanks. First, to my friends and family, some of whom were made unwitting participants in this privacy-obliterating endeavor, and all of whom—especially my wonderful girlfriend (whose name the dedicated hunters know already)—were incredibly understanding and played along. Also to Nick Thompson, who sacrificed an insane amount of hours from other work and from promoting his own book (“The Hawk and The Dove,” which is getting a fantastic response, and which everyone should check out), to serve as the lead investigator. Without Nick, the whole thing would have failed in a multitude of ways. As well everyone at Wired and Lone Shark Games (particularly Teeuwyn Woodruff and Mike Selinker), both for enabling it and putting in many of their own hours. And finally to all the folks who hunted me—and aided me—for contributing their obsession and ingenuity, and especially for (with a few pretty harmless exceptions) honoring the rules about harassing my family. Many have emailed—and I want to hear from anyone who followed it: eratliff@atavist.net—to let me know they were glad I was caught. I don’t blame them. And although I was disappointed, I’m pretty pleased that at least it was by a clever bunch like Jeff Reifman and the guys at Naked Pizza.

I’d also like to offer an apology, to people I encountered along the way and deceived about my identity. It was one of the worst parts of the whole experience. I’ve been contacting them individually to explain whenever possible (a strange journalistic endeavor, that), and they’ve so far been gracious and forgiving, taking the whole thing in the spirit of fun it was intended. But many I won’t be able to find, and to them I am sorry. I won’t write about anyone by name who hasn’t given me explicit approval to do so.

To critics who griped that it wasn’t “real” enough; that it was either too easy to find me or (as people argued right up until I was caught) too difficult; that a “true” man-on-the-run would or wouldn’t have done this or that; I can only say: You nailed it! I wasn’t, in fact, a “real” fugitive. Very well observed, and I fully support your conviction that you would have done it better. But in our case, we were trying to remain, as much as possible, both authentic and engaging, two goals that were often in conflict. In compressing my time on the lam into 30 days, with the general public as the investigators, we didn’t exactly have a model to follow. You may also find that many of the things people found most “unreal,” like me using my ATM and credit cards at times, were not at all what they seemed.

Finally, to accusations of carrying out a “stunt,” I plead guilty to all but the pejorative assumption—given that category would include the journalistic “stunts” behind “Hell’s Angels,” “The Paper Lion” (and other Plimpton adventures), “Into Thin Air,” and “Nickled and Dimed,” among other pieces of narrative nonfiction that I greatly admire. We attempted what we thought was a unique, albeit self-indulgent and inevitably flawed, reporting venture. We’re hoping readers will find the results as fascinating as we did. But you can check out the December article and decide for yourselves.

The trouble with stories of people caught faking deaths, or just lighting out on the run, however, is that in hindsight they always seem to fall victim to a singular dumb error. (Or, in the case of plane-jumper Marcus Shrenker, probably the recent fake-death attempt people are most familiar with, a tidy collection of dumb errors). “If I had just…” is the refrain of the caught fugitive, while stories of successful lives on the lam — for obvious reasons — never get told. Even the Matthew Alan Sheppards of the world can’t tell us what I think we really want to know: so how hard is it really, to disappear?

So I decided to try it.

For part two of the story, I’m going on the lam for 30 days. The magazine has put a $5000 bounty on my head for anyone who finds me.  The contest has a variety of rules, for both me and my presumptive pursuers, to try and make it a reasonable simulation of a real life on the run. The most important of which, for me, is this incentive: if I am found before September 15, most of that $5k comes out of my story fee.

You can find the details, and follow or participate in the speculation, at www.wired.com/vanish. They’ll have any info on my bank account usage, cell phone, email, and the like, along with disturbingly large professional photos of me taken from every angle (which are also in the magazine). The man running that site, my editor Nick Thompson, wants me found, and he doesn’t have a clue where I’m going. So anything that comes from him is trustworthy. Anything that purports to come from me, well, I’ll leave that up to you to decide.

I’m not dropping out, though, heading for a cabin or living in a cave. So security permitting, I’ll be posting more thoughts and leftovers from the first piece here over the month — or however long I make it. But if you are reading this, it means I’m already gone.

Our work begins with a new framework of oversight and governance of all aspects of our Financial Stability Plan.

The American people will be able to see where their tax dollars are going and the return on their government’s investment, they will be able to see whether the conditions placed on banks and institutions are being met and enforced, they will be able to see whether boards of directors are being responsible with taxpayer dollars and how they’re compensating their executives, and they will be able to see how these actions are impacting the overall flow of lending and the cost of borrowing.

These new requirements, which will be available on a new website FinancialStability.gov, will give the American people the transparency they deserve.

(Clicking over there a few minutes ago, I found a text-only “coming soon” page, with links to Geithner’s remarks. In a way, the page echoes the lack of detail critics observed in the speech itself.) FinancialStability.gov thus joins Recovery.gov, the designated future source of stimulus bill spending, and Astrongmiddleclass.gov, a site that’s meant to provide info on the Vice President’s middle class task force. The former sits idle, awaiting instructions that will presumably come with the passage of the bill. The latter redirects to a section of the White House Web site, and contains the same Obama-esque design. All this Web building, but to what end?

In general, developing sites around specific (and pressing) issues to keep the public informed strikes me as a good idea. But if some or many of these proposals are simply going to sit on Whitehouse.gov, with the same 500-character comment box, it’s going to be hard to keep declaring each of them as an exercise in some kind of extreme transparency.

Clint Hendler at the Columbia Journalism Review notes Obama’s view of Recovery.gov, as outlined in his recent Indiana town hall meeting:

“We’re actually going to set up something called Recovery.gov—this is going to be a special website we set up, that gives you a report on where the money is going in your community, how it’s being spent, how many jobs it’s being created so that all of you can be the eyes and ears. And if you see that a project is not working the way it’s supposed to, you’ll be able to get on that website and say, ‘You know, I thought this was supposed to be going to school construction but I haven’t noticed any changes being made.’ And that will help us track how this money is being spent. …The key is that we’re going to have strong oversight and strong transparency to make sure this money isn’t being wasted.”

I don’t agree with Hendler that’s Obama offers “far more detail” than the version of the Recovery.gov mentioned in the bills themselves. (The House bill has arguably more specificity on exactly the points Obama highlights: where the money is being spent and how many jobs are created.) But I do agree that the big question will be to what extent, and in what format, the actual data will be released, providing the basis for a more legitimate type of transparency — the kind where outside entities can parse the numbers themselves.

One reassuring development: TechPresident relays that Bev Godwin of the General Services Administration and USA.gov — whom I reported about in my recent Wired piece — is detailing to the White House new media team.

Well, via TechPresident, we learn that the YouTube afficionado most outraged by his inability to see his own grainy face alongside the President’s is…House Republican leader John Boener.

Boener’s people want his own video approved as an official response to the President’s January 24 address. They’ve got a point. If you’re going to allow “djfishbone” to advance our democratic dialogue by writing “YEA BUSH 2.0!! i’m not getting on the bus and going to the camp,” why not a proper video reply from the House Republican Leader? It’s possible that Obama’s new media folks have mistaken Boener, so…YouTubeish a screen name, for a less serious respondent.

Then again, Boener must have his hands full already, composing witty ripostes to his own video respondents, of which he has approved one. I can’t wait to see how he comes back at this guy:

Upon further reflection, though, the Obama policy seemed even more baffling. After all, they didn’t stop people from speaking to me. In fact, they kindly arranged some interviews. They just wouldn’t let those people put their name behind their (completely uncontroversial) words. More to the point, however, I was actually interviewing these people about transparency, which led to unintentionally ironic anonymice like this:

“Day one, do we need a White House My.BarackObama? I don’t think so,” says the Obama aide, who was required by the transition press office to speak anonymously. “It’s more important to step back and ask, what are the goals for the White House? And I think that making the government more accountable and transparent is more important than getting people to act.”

Important, but not so important as to warrant putting an actual person’s name behind the statement. To top it off, the Obama aide didn’t even seem to want to remain anonymous. They just didn’t want to break the rules. Even stranger, some of those same people have since spoken in public forums and made the exact statements which I was forced to keep un-attributed.

As Jack Schaffer points out today at Slate, this sort of knee-jerk impulse toward anonymity is also afoot in White House press “background briefings.” At the very least, an administration promising to be the most transparent in history should be required to offer an explanation for the policy, and probably discard it altogether, save for especially sensitive circumstances. It would be a good first step in creating a “presumption of openness.”

The first week of the Obama administration has offered answers to what were probably the four biggest questions about how he would translate the campaign’s tech acumen into the White House:

The first, which I addressed earlier in the week, was to what extent would the White House Web site feature the kind of social media and participation elements — common to the campaign and Change.gov — on day one? Answer: not much.  There’s a blog and some YouTube videos (see number two, below), but only a standard feedback form for contact. Personally, I’m neither surprised nor particularly disappointed about the lack of interactivity, which I don’t find particularly compelling in the first place. I am a little surprised that it took them a few days to get the executive orders up. But it is the first week.

The second was: would the Obama administration let bureacractic and legal obstacles get in the way of what they wanted to do online? Answer: apparently not. In posting the YouTube videos, the campaign circumvented the federal government’s long running inability to make a deal that would let them utilize YouTube (over, among other issues, YouTube’s terms of service, which require that any disputes be resolved in federal court — a no go for the executive branch.) As far as I can tell, there is no closed captioning on the current videos, which would be in violation of amendments to the 1973 Rehabilitation Act.  They also have quietly sidestepped prohibitions on government Web sites using persistant cookies.

Third, would Obama be allowed to keep his BlackBerry? Answer: Yes.

Finally, what would the Obama team do to try and keep alive the grassroots activism that flourished during the campaign? Or, in shorthand, to whence the list of 13 million email addresses gathered during the campaign? Answer: A new outfit, called Organizing for America (OFA), that will be housed at the Democratic National Committee. Obama announced the new setup in an email and video last week, and then David Plouffe and Mitch Stewart, the new executive director of OFA, talked about the handoff today. The campaign social networking hub, MyBarackObama.com, now has a form for people to enter there information and have it ported over to OFA. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of response they get, and whether they release the numbers.

This weekend on NPR (Sunday, I think, on most stations), I’ll have a stint on Bob Garfield’s show, “On the Media.” UPDATE: Here is my appearance, and here is the transcript.

UPDATE 2: I also appeared on BBC Five Live Radio on the same topic. Podcast available here.

Meanwhile, Change.gov is now frozen but still up; it’ll be interesting to see what they do with it, if anything. And if the transition team carried out the promise made on their “Citizen’s Briefing Book” segment, Obama at this very moment has a notebook on his desk revealing the nation’s top priority, according to the online crowd’s wisdom: “ending marijuana prohibition.” Somehow I’m guessing the answer is…no we can’t.

UPDATE: I should have noted that the first blog post on Whitehouse.gov is authored by Macon Phillips, I quoted in the Wired story and who was one of the savviest people I spoke with. It bodes well for the White House Web operation that he stayed on. Several of the biggest names from the campaign’s Web side returned to the private sector.

UPDATE 2: Some blog reaction: PC World notes the changes and the lack of avenues for participation, and points out that the Bush transition team flubbed their own digital transition in 2001.  Tim O’Reilly, not surprisingly, trumpets the site as the culmination of a victory for “Web 2.0 principles” — although it’s unclear how those principles are actually reflected in the site. Kottke observes the Obama team’s more parsimonious coding. Valleywag gets all clever with a they-say-they-for-participation-but-look-no-comments-allowed joke. (In other news: Valleywag still exists! Who knew.) And much more.