By: Blonde One
I am not known for my ability with numbers but I do like a good statistic. On the last expedition I heard a fascinating statistic from our Young Leader, Search, who is soon to embark on a career in journalism. Apparently 31% of blogs are fraudulent and the writer is just making up experiences that haven’t actually happened! This is an incredibly high number I think. I don’t understand why you would make up a blog. It’s surely much better to either write a fiction novel or get out and about and do stuff for real. The Two Blondes would like to reassure you that we are Blonde, we do walk (a lot) on Dartmoor, we do lead and teach others to ‘get out there’, we do actually fall in bogs and we do all of the things that we write about. We are real, credible people writing about authentic experiences.
Your authenticity shines through – but what a dishonest world we live in! (Do you by any chance also mend computers?)
‘Cos this one has been behaving very badly and has just been reduced to an operating system re-install, which means EVERYTHING has to be reset!
I realise it isn’t very Dartmoorish but if you could drop half a line every so often about Search’s progress I for one would be fascinated. The Internet has greatly reduced opportunities for employment in journalism (especially among industrial and trade mags) and things are pretty tough. Whereas in my day journalism was the default occupation for people like me who knew nothing, had no academic qualifications, paid no attention to their appearance, were socially inept, suffered more than most during adolescence, and who might well – through sheer inanition – have drifted into low-grade crime. An excellent preparation for doing a blog sixty years later, although we weren’t to know that at the time.
So 31% of bloggers fib as a matter of course. Something tells me I could spot such fraudsters from a long way off and I’m moderately confident none of the blogs I follow are based on sand. However problems do arise when you pass the thousand-post mark and you find yourself tempted by repetition. Those big broad topics one dashed off in the early days start looking terribly wasteful – potentially the basis for half a dozen posts. One answer is to start thinking smaller. Thus, for instance, instead of expatiating on boots as Blonde Two does in a more recent post, try doing something on laces. And then, another thousand posts further on, when desperation sets in again, consider the little metal tags at the ends of laces.
Not that either of you need worry. Both of you continue to appear as fresh as newly baked loaves. Not, you’ll notice, daisies.
Not a bad idea. Those little tags at the end of laces really are key to a successful expedition. Lose them, and you have the butterfly effect possibilities open up: A lace that won’t tie, a trip over a rock, a broken ankle, a helicopter ride, a love affair with the pilot, a love child who likes walking but only if he can look upwards at the sky, an astronaut, a new planet, a space colony …
We are interested, why not daisies? And do you really bake them?
a bit late in the day for this comment but:
in another but related universe, it was and is quite common for people to falsely claim to have climbed mountain ‘x’ or have lead route ‘y’ (and that without counting the number of imaginary ‘first ascents’) not just in little local jaunts but sometimes big ones in the ‘greater ranges’ – as they are, inevitably, ‘defrocked’ sooner or later and any reputation or kudos they might have gained from honest toil replaced by lifelong (and posthumous, eternal) ridicule and ostracisation, it really does make one wonder what is inside their heads – as the same sort of thing is a considerable and potentially seriously dangerous scandal in the world of scientific and medical research, the existence of an entirely parallel universe of anti-reality must be suspected: go Search, and make that a life study !
Anti-Reality is, thank goodness not the same thing as Blonde-Reality which is much more fun, and firmly routed in Actual-Reality. With all of that information available on the internet, I wonder if there is any way of measuring the percentage of truth involved.