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Wednesday, April 05, 2006

 

Blogging your brand

Poor Beloved. Not only does he have to put up with all the time I sink into blog, and every family moment being potential blog fodder, but he has to endure a blogosphere play-by-play as it tries to pass for polite dinner conversation.

(Sidebar: I just had an interesting insight. Are blogs to women of our generation what soap operas were to the women of the previous generation? Discuss.)

So I was telling Beloved about this blogger, who happens to be a columnist for one of our national dailies, and her post about buying $140 designer jeans for her daughter. Her two-year-old daughter. Once we got past the whole idea of spending that much money on a single pair of pants for a toddler, we started discussing her blog in general, and how I can't quite warm up to it because I think she posts stuff just to be inflamatory and get people talking about her.

And Beloved said, "So what?"

I thought about it, and he's right. Who says blogging has to be sincere, or genuine, or authentic? Maybe her life really is just like she posts in her blog, but I think she torques it to get people talking - if not to her, at least about her. She's using her blog to promote her brand, and if it's working, more power to her. It's that old axiom, I guess, about say whatever you want about me in the papers, just make sure you spell my name right.

She's drawing a surprising amount of venom and vitriol, though. I've been writing this blog more or less daily for a year, and she gets more hateful comments in a day than I've gotten altogether. (Come to think of it, I've never gotten a hateful comment. Touch wood.) Someone's even gone to all the trouble of making a mockup of her blog. And while I don't agree with a lot of what she writes, or have a lot in common with her, I kind of admire her ability to stir things up.

What do you think? Go ahead, choose a topic - blogs as modern-day soaps, $140 jeans for toddlers, truth and accuracy in blogging, blogging to promote your brand - surely there's something worth commenting on!