I hadn’t considered that angle on the two blogs (TG and ALLC). They are different in voice, structure, topic, and intent, so yes, the apples/kumquats comparison registers with me now! I can also see how the process needed for each blog changes the traffic flow – on that note, considering how much less effort I am putting into cross-linking and other promotion moves for ALLC, I’m now pretty pleased with the traffic, lol!

You make some good points that I want to address, even if they’re a little tangential to where I was going with this post.

Authenticity and transparency are different, but they work synergistically, imho, especially with user generated content.

Authenticity (to me) is the emphasis on the truthfulness of the user (author’s) experience, attributions, commitments, sincerity, and intentions; it is not a copy or re-telling of someone else’s material.

Your work on ALLC is authentic because it is a sincere expression of your experiences intended to help people better understand the life of someone with a chronic illness. My ability to authentically share your story is limited by my ability to get inside your head, in other words – if I could do that, I might be able to give authentic voice to your experiences, but possibly not, just as a copy always differs from the original. Despite the fact that we both have chronic, disabling illnesses, my truths aren’t yours – if we tried to make them so, we’d be disingenuous and that would come through loud and clear.

Transparency, on the other hand, is a systematic approach within organizations to make practices, assertions, concepts and theories publicly visible. For example, I don’t accept paid advertising here on AE, however, I do recommend proven tools like Site Build It that I receive compensation for if and when someone purchases.

So, for the sake of transparency, I disclose that up front. Same with my bias for self-employment over subsidized employment for people with disabling conditions; it’s pretty clear which side of the fence I am on, although you’d have to comb the archives for the original statements and arguments I used to lay out my position. (note to self: clean that up)

Where these are vitally important factors in any business, they become even more critical when you take center stage on your own blog or website and proclaim yourself a subject matter expert.

Think about the furor over James Frey and A Million Little Pieces – what got people up in arms was that he cared more about telling a story than telling his story. When he was outed for his actions, instead of being transparent and admitting his fabrication, he punted and failed the authenticity test by obscuring the truthfulness of his assertions – i.e. he admitted he used “composite” experiences.

A mosaic is quite different than a photograph, and while both art forms are enjoyable, saying they are one and the same is, at best, farcical, because it is clearly obvious that they are not the same thing.

Now, about your comments on frequency and consistency in blog posting. I went back and checked your stats on both sites to see if your assertions were, indeed, truthful and honestly, they really aren’t. Can I stress, yet again, the importance of comparing apples to apples, not apples and kumquats?

Yes, your readership growth for ALLC is slightly slower, however you have more incoming links, comments and bookmarks than you did for TG at the same period. While the growth may seem slower, you’re actually doing less promotion and cross linking than we did in the early days with TG, and accordingly, you get less traffic. You can’t do a straight line comparison, in other words – just as the only similarity between kumquats and apples is that they’re both fruit, the only similarity between the two blogs is that they’re both using WordPress as your primary infrastructure.

I totally understand and agree why ALLC isn’t a daily blog. However, if I could suggest anything to help you continue to grow it, I’d suggest adding some transparency to your process – tell people that it’s only updated periodically and why – it isn’t whiney to tell people you’re fumbling for vocabulary that doesn’t really exist. It is authentically you, however to bring up the subject at all

The other blog, A Life Less Convenient, is updated about every 3 days. It takes me much longer to think and write about what I have to say there. It is about my bodily experience of being a sick person, and on an emotional and professional level, the blog is about humiliations and overcoming failures on different fronts through humor. I have noticed as a result that my traffic has not climbed as quickly or consistently as that of TG, but while TG is close to my heart, it is not actually my heart. ALLC *is* me, and it’s tricky terrain to boot.

It would be too easy to sound full-on whiney in ALLC, and I suspect that I may come back in two years and cringe for precisely that reason while reading my recent entries. I try to avoid that because honestly, I don’t feel whiney most of the time; I feel an urgency and a drive though, and I have an ongoing conversation in my head with pain and the sensations that my body sends. I hope none of that translates into “poor me.” I want to be truthful to the experience of illness and all the obstacles it presents. I would rather have delayed posts there because the delay allows me to serve a “higher good”: capturing as authentically as I can my reality.

I read an article about some female bloggers, among them Jessica Cutler. The women talked about their very popular blogs. When asked by the interviewer about how much time they invested in their blogs, they replied anywhere from 10-15 hours per week to about 20-30 minutes per day, which included answering emails. There is no way in hell I could do that for ALLC. For one thing, I struggle with making certain concepts about disease understood, and then I try to communicate my perceptions of it, my experience of it.

As far as user-based modalities changing a business, blogs have changed my perception of what is “good writing.” I used to think that a person was a “good writer” once a big publishing house came knocking. Now I am more likely to go shopping at the smaller publishing houses and to see if my favorite bloggers are selling their books from their sites.