Joe's website is a daily chronicle of Joe and what Joe knows. If only Joe could even figure out who Joe is.

Joe looks like a regular, scruffy, college type of guy. He wears a solid color T-shirt, a faded pair of pants, a tattered pair of black-and-white checkered shoes that look like they could split into at any moment. He has a bushy goatee. He has a nice computer. Lots of DVDs.

This is Joe Swanberg - or is it? Joe Swanberg the SIU film student? Joe Swanberg from Naperville? It sure looks like it, but it only stands to raise the question: Who is Joe Maxwell?

A delusional fantasy?

An imaginary friend?

Or is he Joe Swanberg's lurking alter ego, a regular old Joe who's started an Internet diary and is wooing a chick from Portland, Ore., while waiting for the debut album from some unknown band named The Sunrise.

When it comes to the Internet, who knows anymore?

Joe knows. That's because Joe Swanberg's website, www.knowingjoe.com, is a smear of reality through which a fictionalized version of himself, aptly named Joe Maxwell, has a life. He lives and breathes. He makes movies. He gossips with friends. He posts daily updates on the mundane details of his life.

None of it is really real.

Neither are his "friends," who all keep their own sites.

"Joe Maxwell is that ultimate person who's engaged in that reality craze," Swanberg says of his cyber doppelganger, who has been leaving his personal feelings on his website since late last year, when Swanberg first started this project as an alternative to telling a linear story through film. "It's closely tied to my own life. Joe Maxwell is supposed to be this guy who's immersed in digital culture. [This project] will serve as a history of the Internet."

So, Swanberg's project is creative, to be sure, but it comes with its own brand of irony. Imagine a culture so consumed by its own voyeurism that it develops dozens of channels of reality television, a pop-culture craze that presents fiction under the clever veil of fact. Now give that culture the Internet. Suddenly, lies and half-truths run rampant. Gossip abounds. People chat with each other using a new brand of Internet language once known only to cyber geeks but now well established enough to make it into Webster's, and they begin talking, becoming friends, falling in love.

They furnish their own lies upon dial-up. On the Internet, you can be whoever you want to be. There are no paupers here - only princes. Every one can get online and tell their own, idealized stories.

"I blend my real life with my fake life to make it more exciting than it really is," says Kris Williams, an SIU student who has assumed the role of Anna Payne, one of Joe's friends, on her own site. "I'm willing to play into the concept that it's real for as far as they want to take it. It's a whole new way of communicating. You can be whoever you want."

So, the premise goes that the handful of people Swanberg has running sites in partnership with his are slowly, but steadily developing a story on a day-to-day basis, a sprawling narrative that blends their real lives with a fictional storyline that could go anywhere. The main focus of the story is on Joe's blossoming online romance with flickerchick, a Portland, Ore., college girl who is actually played by SIU student Emily Ostendorf.

While Joe has told his followers where the key points of the plot should end up, he's told them that they can "get there however they want to."

And, as a result, there have been varied twists in the road where fictional people have taken on the proportions of reality. These "fakies" are getting e-mails all across the board, correspondences written to faceless names, and some, namely flickerchick, are being asked for even more interaction from random webcrawlers not in the know. Once, Ostendorf, who came onto the project because "Joe needed a girl," even found her alter ego involved in a costume contest - involving saran wrap.

No one - not even Joe - knows where this web of a story is going. Swanberg has set an ambitious plan before his team, hoping to carry on the project indefinitely, forever having them crouched behind their real-world faces.

Sure, they may not be real.

In the end, though, that's the whole point.

"Joe Maxwell will hopefully continue for the rest of my life," Swanberg says. "I'll continue to have this alter ego."

To get in on the story, visit www.knowingjoe.com and www.flickerchick.com