-- Kermit The Frog, the world's best known sockpuppet, on the topic of his creator, Jim Henson.

Puppetry is the art of animating an inanimate object and using it to tell a story. It originated, it is estimated, around 30,000 BC, and the art is still around, not only in shows like the Muppets, but in the guise of people and organizations creating fake online personas.

Maybe you are already using this technique. Have you ever lied about who you are online? Do you have multiple identities for social networks such as Facebook or that aren't explicitly tied to you? Do you have email addresses that you use to be anonymous even if it's just to stop getting spammed? These are all aspects of what are called "").

And if you do any of the above, you aren't alone. There are all sorts of people and organizations out there building their own fake personas for all sorts of reasons while scores of other organizations, both commercial and governmental, are trying to unravel whatever Web of personas everyone else has created.

But how big is this underverse of fakery? Well, by 29% of the world population is online, some 1.97 billion users ... which seems highly unlikely to me.