Why did I stay up until 2:00 in the morning last night without any homework due today? I blame it on you, Achillesheel. Last week you posted a very interesting entry about Lonelygirl15, the video blogger, “Bree,” with mass viewership (100s of thousands/entry), who, as it turns out, is nothing more than the creation of three 23 year-old men and the actress they hired to play the main character. After reading your entry, I started checking out the vlog. What first drew me in was its mundane and uneventful nature. Lives really aren’t that interesting on a moment to moment basis and “Bree” doesn’t claim hers to be otherwise. The girl’s dull presentation of lackluster subjects – how her friend, Daniel, is lazy and rarely does anything, for example - leaves much to be desired. I wondered, what is it about this vlog that has intrigued so many people? (If any of you want to watch a couple of episodes, the link is at the bottom and I’d love to have this puzzle explained to me.) Not able to figure out the answer after a few “episodes,” I had to watch more. It was not a good cycle.

Becoming a "blogger" myself has forced me to pay more attention to the wonderful wide world of online authorship, and the latest story/controversy sure is a good one. lonelygirl15 was a screenname attached to a teenage girl named "Bree" who used myspace and youtube to display diary entries predominantly in video form. Though there are tons of similar diaries and videos, Bree's attracted a huge and devoted audience eager to know everything about her. They became skeptical that she was actually a 15-year old from suburban America and started sleuthing. This week the identities of the true creators was revealed to be three twenty-something male filmmakers who hired a 19 year old actress to "play" Bree.