---
title: "Being fake (Sins of blogging)"
date: 2009-09-15
description: "Seven deadly sins of blogging  1.0 → Being fake (Sins of blogging)  1.1 Being irrelevant (Sins of..."
canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/2009/09/15/seven-deadly-sins-of-blogging-1-being-fake/
---
# Being fake (Sins of blogging)
### Fake Hurts the Currency of the Blogosphere

If there's one advantage blogs have over other media, such as television, magazines, and even newspapers, it's trust, because bloggers aren't supposed to be fake. Bloggers are usually independent voices, without financial motives or agendas.  The blogger is somewhat of a free-roaming analyst, at liberty to write about any topic, from any perspective, without any obligation to corporate requirements. With such freedom, the independent blogger automatically has a certain degree of reader trust.

This sense of trust is key to the blog's appeal. In a guest post on Problogger, [Tony Hung says](http://www.problogger.net/archives/2007/01/09/the-rules-behind-creating-a-great-blog/) trust is "the only real currency in the blogosophere." Hung explains,

> At the end of the day, trust is the only real currency in the blogosphere, and people who read blogs have the expectation that they're getting at the truth — in whatever form the truth is to them. And because there is the presumption of truth, readers will often react in an intense fashion to being manipulated, hoodwinked, and otherwise bamboozled.

In other words, the strong card that bloggers hold is a sense of trust with readers, which comes from their display of candid honesty. Readers react strongly when they find out a blogger is bamboozling them. For example, a few years ago, Edelman PR created a blog for Wal-Mart called [Wal-Marting Across America](http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/oct2006/db20061018_445917.htm) that consisted of a couple supposedly traveling across America in an RV checking out all the Wal-Marts along the way and writing about their experiences. When someone discovered that Wal-Mart was paying their expenses and sponsoring the trip, readers were furious because the blog was fake.