Persona Redux

Okay. I have a few more things I want to say about fictional blogs and personas, and then I am going to get back to some real work. Or maybe go out and sit in the sun, since Spring has finally sprung.

Personally, I have absolutely no interest in doing a fictional blog. I think it would be very hard to maintain the quality and consistency of voice that would be required. I’m just not that good a writer. BUT I can imagine that an excellent writer, one who could get really into character, could pull it off, and create a fun experience for his or her readers.

There are tons of examples of role play games on the Internet (the grandchildren of Dungeons and Dragons) where people do something very similar. Each writer takes on a role and they collectively write the story. Not hard to imagine that the same people who enjoy this activity might get into having a conversation with a fictional character, even a "for-profit" one.

The writers of anonymous blogs can also create new personas for themselves. There is nothing wrong with anonymous blogging, but when the persona is created, versus your "real" self (and online, what is that anyway, but I digress…) it is pretty much the same thing as the blog by a fictional character like Spencer Katt. The difference of couse is that often you won’t know that the anonymous blogger IS a persona. In fact, Jozef Imrich who commented on my previous post on this topic included a link to an article about just such a situation in the legal profession.

For me, the key is transparency: if you are open and honest about the nature of your activity, you should be free to try out all sorts of new ideas. Some will work. Some will fail. Some people will hate ’em. Others love ’em.

Something isn’t "lame" just because you don’t like it. Something is "lame" if the people for whom it was intended, the desired audience for the thing, think it is lame. My 5-year old son loves a lot of TV programs that I personally think are pretty silly but he loves them (and the products advertised thereon). Home run for Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go, among others.

There is room for more than one opinion, more than one approach, and in the end, it will be the customers who decide what works and what doesn’t. No amount of posting and cross posting is going to change that.