• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, September 11, 2006

One of the biggest Web 2.0 stunts is hurtling towards its conclusion, as whoever's behind YouTube's newest starlet, the vlogger "LonelyGirl 15," appears poised to come clean.

This spring, videos of "LonelyGirl 15," a supposedly home-schooled 16-year-old, surfaced on YouTube. She detailed her so-called life in a series of high-quality clips. "LonelyGirl," aka "Bree," made videos in which she spoke about her made-for-TV religious father, a lazy eye and her friend "Daniel."

But the popular videos--they racked up around 1.5 million views by the end of August--seemed fishy. The quality was just a little too good; the story arcs a little too Hollywood.

People began to wonder whether the videos were Web 2.0's first "Blair Witch" campaign--a promotional effort for a movie masquerading as user-produced content. But the very things that lent the 1999 "Blair Witch" campaign an air of authenticity--the grainy video and shaky camera work-- were suspiciously absent from the LonelyGirl 15 oeuvre.

By the end of August, the videos had been viewed around 1.5 million times, drawing worldwide media attention. The U.K. paper The Times ran a credulous article, "Worldwide fame for a lonely girl," which included an e-mail from Bree explaining that she found vlogging more fun than her usual routine, in which she found herself "stuck studying the Treaty of Versailles or Occam's razor." The article even included an expert weighing in with the opinion that people post video logs as a form of therapy.

But other journalists were skeptical. Virginia Heffernan of The New York Times devoted several blog entries to sussing out whether Bree was genuine and, if not, who was likely behind the videos.

By last week, three consumer-detectives who had corresponded with "Lonely Girl" figured out that Bree's e-mails were originating from Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency. The revelations forced the site's creators to finally admit the jig was up, though they have yet to reveal the entire story.

"Thank you so much for enjoying our show so far," they posted on an online forum devoted to LonelyGirl 15. "With your help we believe we are witnessing the birth of a new art form. Our intention from the outset has been to tell a story-- A story that could only be told using the medium of video blogs and the distribution power of the internet."

The authors of the post promise that more details will come out in time. For now, many questions remain--including some questions about whether CAA really is behind the stunt, or if they're being set up somehow.

Regardless, as with "The Blair Witch Project," LonelyGirl 15 undoubtedly will prove far less interesting to people now that it's clear she's at least partially a creation of Hollywood.