At the risk of offending bunches of people and possibly shaking up the readership here, I feel like I should tell you something. You are potentially being manipulated. If you read blogs, any blogs, most likely you are being manipulated. If you write a blog, most likely you are manipulating. From this point on I will include myself in these statements by using the word “we”, though I am realizing that what I am about to say is something I want to try not to do.

We are narcissistic bloggers. We, for one reason or another, think others care about what we have to say. That’s why we have a blog. We think intently about what we say in order to appear a certain way to those who are reading. We scratch and claw to get more readers, and figure out ways to draw more attention to ourselves. We will steal, cheat, and manipulate others into talking about us on their blogs. We try to come up with something more clever and newer than anyone else and we need to do it first. And we do it for stats. Stats that tell us that we are more important that someone else. You didn’t want to know that did you? Or maybe you already did know it.

Here’s one way we do this, and it’s a complaint I have heard several times about blogs. We go on an on about something because we are the “experts”. We want others to know we are the “experts” and we hope that they think we are smart. I’ve done it, and several other people have too. Sure we want to put our best foot forward and come across a certain way to our readers, and many times we sacrifice authenticity in doing so. We only show people what we want them to see, and sometimes that’s not the “real us”. It’s the blogging us. The “public” us.

Now, I’m not saying there is anything wrong with thinking through what you write on a blog, or even word things a certain way to prove a point. All I am saying is lately I have seen several blogs become an arm wrestling match for attention and the authenticity of many of those blogs have suffered. And I feel like I am just as guilty as anyone else falling into that trap and I don’t really like it. We have stopped blogging in a genuine, authentic way and are focussing on simply getting more people to click on our names.

Here’s the deal. I want this place to be a place where I am as authentic as I can possibly be, and I encourage you to take that to your blog. If there is authenticity in your writing it doesn’t matter if there are 10 or 1000 people reading your blog. Am I off base here? Now, I know that I have paid attention to my stats before. I have watched them go up and know when they drop. Today I started wondering why. My job right now is to get people to read other peoples blogs. Mainly the artists that I am working with to benefit their careers. I could be wrong about this, and maybe I am, but it’s something that I have seen a lot of lately, and I’m not quite sure how to not get sucked into it.

What do you think? Do you fall into this?