By Jack Driscoll
Either a lot of bloggers are modest or their software templates are doing them a disservice.
Like a lot of surfers, I have favorite blogs that I read regularly, but I also look at few most days using that mysterious approach known as random selection.
I’m moving fast, as is our wont on the web. And a high percentage of the time I’m unable or hard-pressed to find out who the author is.
The good bloggers know better. One of the best, Jason Kottke, has the following hyperlinked top-of-the-page blurb:
“kottke.org is a weblog about the liberal arts 2.0 edited by Jason Kottke since March 1998. You can read about me and kottke.org here.”
He always lists his individual and group blog favorites, several of which use the pronouns “I” and “We”. Who are I and We? Some of them never tell you, or they tie you up for several looooong minutes trying to find out.
Recently I read a blog that referenced our esteemed leader, Ellen Hume, executive director of C4FCM. The first paragraph read:
“I ran across a blog post this morning that got me thinking about when you should trust a blog you’re not familiar with.”
That got my attention adequately. The title of the blog was News Notes. The URL was http://www.blogsmonroe.com/editors/2008/10/blogs-and-politics-a-scary-mix/. But there was no person’s name on the blog.
So I checked out www.blogsmonroe.com where I learned that News Notes came from a Monroe County blog community. Trouble is, several states have counties called Monroe. Hard pressed, I had to fish around to guess it was from Michigan.
In the long list of blogs was one called News Notes, which I clicked on to (luckily) find the same article with the byline Dan Shaw. So it would seem Dan Shaw was not at fault for using several first-person pronouns in a blog that made its way onto the web with no byline. While I have not made an exhaustive study, I mostly find these “anonymous” blogs on sites using WordPress.
One final example: I came across a blog that started in September called “Rye Reflections.” It caught my attention, because I am part of an online community publication called “Rye Reflections” at www.ryereflections.org.
This blog is a little different. At the end of each item is a line saying, “Posted by Jason Thompson”. In the upper right corner is photo of him, although it is cropped such that you can only see from the middle of his nose up.
Alas, however, not far from the photo are 3 lines:
About Me
Jason Thompson
View my complete profile
The last line is hyperlinked, so I, of course, clicked on it. It brought me to a blogger.com page that showed the following:
Jason Thompson
My Blogs
rye reflections
That last line also was hyperlinked and brought me back to his blog.
I rest my case.
(Lest you wonder: Jack Driscoll formerly was The Editor of the Boston Globe, has been active in citizen journalism for 15 years and serves on the Advisory Board of C4FCM. His webpage is at web.media.mit.edu/~driscoll/).