Blog Minx

When surfing through the interweb you come across a lot of sites which have images of pretty blond girls. Some of the webmasters really are pretty blond girls, but some most certainly aren’t. They’re guys who know that images of attractive, sexy-looking girls will generate more traffic, especially if they post comments on other sites with their avatar alongside.

I think we’re all grown up enough to know that this goes on. Still, whenever there’s a whiff of deception people are often up in arms about it. Take LonelyGirl15 on YouTube last year, whose series of ‘personal’ videos earned much traffic and discussion until it was revealed she was actually an actress from New Zealand (no, it wasn’t me).

And now there’s speculation that blogger Kumiko, who I mentioned in this post only a few days ago, may not be real either. I don’t know whether it’s true or not – at the very least her blog has some good advice – but people don’t like to be fooled.

Do you hold such trickery against the webmaster or do you admire their cunning efforts to generate more traffic or sales? Do ‘hoax’ identities work or generally fall flat?

Warning: Movie spoiler approaching…

Either way, I love Swollen Pickles‘ comparison of the man-posing-as-woman-blogger situation to The Crying Game.