WE LOVE IT!
Thank yew Diggers’ Realm (our first Blogad on this site by the way) for the tip on a major HOAX played on Blogtopia.
Writes Glenn Reynolds:”LIBERTARIAN GIRL has been unmasked as a fraud. But did she get a White House press pass?”
It turns out that Libertarian Girl wasn’t the beautiful young lady pictured on her/his blog after all. It was all a playful hoax…and a delicious one at that. Why? No one was really hurt, the blog was noted for some extremely blunt opinions and posts — and the anonymous guy (we ASSUME he is a guy but what if it IS that gorgeous woman in the original photo?) says in this truly CLASSIC POST he learned some fascinating things:
One thing I learned from this blog is how easy attractive woman have it. When I had a blog as my real self, no one linked to me, no one left any comments, it was as if the blog existed in a vacuum. But things were different for Libertarian Girl. Every day I’d check Technorati and discover new unsolicited links. It was like I had warped into an alternate universe where all the rules had changed. At the rate things were happening, this would have been an A-list blog in a few more months.
It’s funny how there have been some posts in the blogosphere saying that the political blogosphere was a boys club that discriminated against women, as evidenced by how few politics bloggers were women. Boy were they completely off the mark. It’s ten times easier for a woman’s blog to become popular.
Read the whole post. It’s worth it. But we’ll give you his/her/its ending:
I’m going to miss this blog. It was fun having a blog that people actually read, even though it only lasted for less than two months. I should have figured that the type of people who read libertarian blogs are the same type that read Russian brides websites. When I make my next hoax blog, I’ll make sure to use a more obscure photo.
By the way, does anyone know if there really are gorgeous young women in Russia willing to marry much older and uglier men from the United States? Or is it just a scam?
And THIS IS THE SITE that revealed the mini-scam which led to the confession.
FOOTNOTE: We did link to Libertarian Girl, but not because it was a blog by someone whose photo was quite appealing (the original one of the woman, that is, not the one up there now..) But, then we linked to it because TMV has a different attitude towards new bloggers and new ideas. And when we get emails we read all of them and take an email from a new blogger as seriously as we do an email from a famous, big blog blogger. Plus, Libertarian Girl often took extremely pointed positions — which meant it was a great blog to quote for our roundups and Around The Sphere linkfests.
AND WE MUST ADD: I told various people I suspected the blogger wasn’t the one pictured. Anyone can use a picture or phoney name on the Internet and get away with it, or my name isn’t Dan Rather Joe Gandelman.
A CROSS SECTION OF BLOGS COMMENTING ON THE GREAT L.G of 2005. HOAX:
—Dadahead
—Wizbang
—The MUSC Tiger
—Rambling Rhodes
—In Hoc Signo Vinces
—Begging to Differ
—Uncommon Sense
—The Jawa Report
—Jaqueline Mackie Paisy Passey
—Eric’s Random Ramblings
—Blogosphere Out Of Control
—Signifying Nothing
—Doctor Recommended
—Heingineer
—Eternal Recurrance
—Myopic Zeal
—The Unprentent Individual
UPDATE: Some great links and THE LATEST at Ilyka Damen.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.