A guest post at Johnchow.com recently has caught the eye of numerous well-known bloggers, one of whom is Darren Rowse who posted a polite rebuttal in Problogger. The one who wrote the original post replied saying that you can take two angles in blogging — the honest angle and the sensational rock star angle. When I first started writing for Desperate Curiosity, I was struggling on what voice to use. I considered the authoritative angle for a while until I realized that it wasn’t for me. Indeed, I’ve been using blunt honesty for all my blog posts here as of late, admitting my failures and detailing what I plan to do about them in the future.

Why? Simple. I wanted to create a blog that people can relate to. I know enough about blogging to give advice but not enough to never fail and never stumble upon shortcomings. My experiences were detailed for everyone to know that I’m making my journey towards blogging success and everyone’s welcome to jump on the train with me. Indeed, Desperate Curiosity has become a chronicle of what I’ve encountered, what I’ve seen and what I’ve learned along the way. Sharing my learning experiences with people, I believe, is the best way to advise.

There are those, however, who would choose to take the sensational rock star angle. And yes, it does work. Some people like the flair, the panache. They’d rather read something celebs would write rather than what normal people would. Although using rock star sensationalism is a difficult angle to pull off, some people can do it. I believe, that it all lies on what you want to accomplish with your blog. If you want a resource people could relate to, if you want to use blunt honesty (without divulging everything in the process, of course), if you want something which reflects reality, the rock star angle wouldn’t work for you.

Using sensationalism for your blog would require much work. One characteristic you must have is an eye for detail. Chris Garrett has written about honesty in Performancing and there’s nothing more that I could add. Using the rock star sensationalism angle means you can’t talk about your failures, only harp about your successes. Even if you’re in the downers, you still have to write like nothing’s wrong, sometimes even pompously, for the sake of preserving your voice.

Whilst I strive and encourage honesty among bloggers, I admit that the rock star approach would be well-suited for some people. As I’ve said, it depends on what route it is you want your blog to take. Weighs pros and cons, think about it a million times before deciding and finally, decide on whether foregoing honesty in your blog is worth all the risk. As for me, as was stated in this post, I’ll continue detailing my failures and successes — that we may all learn from them and make us realize that being a human who errs isn’t really all that bad.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 3:27 pm and is filed under blogging. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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