I happened across This Article on The New York Times website. The article describes the uncovering of a fictitious online personality, Lonelygirl15, who posted short video blog entries on youtube (a bunch of these videos are viewable here). Appearing to be a somewhat morose but otherwise ordinary teenage girl, she would record short monologues dealing with her frustrations with her parents, apparently random and quirky observations, and the small problems of her day to day life, which garnered a large and apparently somewhat fanatical following. Fans recently uncovered information that demonstrated that "Bree" is portrayed by an actress named Jessica Rose and does not in fact exist. A detailed narrative of the process behind these revelations (and fan reactions) may be found in the reporter's blog, linked from the article. Simply looking at the comments posted about her videos indicates that the backlash has been considerable (User dustincoffman, for example, opines "this bitch needs a dick in her mouth")

I realized that I didn't do any linking in my previous post, so here's an addendum of sorts. I've found it hard to get into personal blogs (ironic considering that I just posted a fairly long personal story about blogs), so I tried searching for blogs about some of my interests, which seems to be something of a common approach here. I settled on music, so I went searching for music blogs.

A number of music blogs seem to be personal blogs that happen to link to mp3s. A good example of this is the horribly named Rawkblog. Much like your typical personal blog, whoever keeps this blog seems to seek approval through posting music that establishes him or her as some kind of music connoisseur. Additionally, the author attempts to establish a relationship between his or her personal life and the music that is posted.

During our first class meetings and the intervening time,I was unable to recall a time when I had actually read a blog regularly or for its own sake. Sure, I had had them linked for me .

Friend on AIM: "u have to check this out!!...link" or sometimes just "link"
Me: "...haha...that's kind of funny I guess." (Dear god, this sucks. Why are they linking it for me?).

Or sometimes I had run into them when googling for something that might actually be useful. However, I usually found the format of the blog itself to be repellant. Without fail, the information I was actually seeking would be buried deep within the back-entries, and I would realize that I really didn't give enough of a damn to sift through the blogger's breathless attempts to make their life seem interesting to perfect strangers. After all, there were about 200,000 other google results that would probably be more helpful and less painful to navigate.