Do Fake blogs harm bloggers?

I’ve been a blogger for a long time – since I was in high school so before 2003 by that point I’d blogged for at least 3 years or more. I might be inclined to say that I’m a bit of a veteran blogger. Back when I was in school very few people I knew had their own website never mind their own blog so owning a website was a rare thing. These days every one and every thing has its own website.

More recently I came across the trend of making money from blogging, as a long term blogger it was difficult to imagine how you could monetize what is essentially a hobby but people do do it. What I found more interesting was the idea that rather than creating legitimate blogs upon a certain subject some individuals choose to pretend they are someone that theyre not in order to appear more knowledgeable than they actually are. The term for this I’ve come across so far is a flog or fake blog.

Possibly the most disturbing case of a flog I’ve found so far is the Hunter College fiasco where International Anticounterfeiting Coalition or IACC sponsored a college course. Students were encouraged to partake in what was described as guerrilla marketing, they created a fake blog of a fake student to create a story encouraging other students to buy certain types of branded products in favour of others. You can even still read the fake blog online, students decided to make the blogger a bubbly blonde haired girl to make her seem more realistic.

This raises all sorts of ethical issues about the college accepting money to engage its students in what was essencially a marketing exercise, the notions of students tricking other students who were unaware of the tactic and also the manner in which the course was taught. The problem is that this sort of thing happens all the time without many internet users realising it. Is there a way to tell a fake blog from a real one?

A lot of the time yes there is but internet users are one thing and Google is another. Google says that these flogs can be caught because the quality of content on a flog wont be as good as on an actual blog. I think that depends on the writer if a flog writer is a better more articulate writer than the blogger it may rank higher in Google.

I’ve never really cared about selling stuff from my blogs they’ve always been something very personal to me and I think thats part of the problem with people who blog for profit especially if their site is a flog. Blogs come across as having people writing them, they engage their readership in a way no advertising campaign could the credibility of a real person adds to the power of a blogs message.

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