One of my favorite shows on TV is House, and last night, the case to be solved involved an interesting blogger. The show overall was good, the case solving unique and what you would expect from House…what I want to discuss is the way that they portrayed the blog world.

If you missed the show, the blogger is a woman who shares every detail of her life with her readers, from her fights with her boyfriend to her food choices, and later on, her medical choices as well. As soon as something new happens, she must blog, and tell the whole world (or at least her readers) what has changed. She explains to her boyfriend that if she chooses what to share, and censors what she says, she isn’t being honest, and the readers expect honesty. In one scene, she finds she needs a new liver, and blogs about it. One of the doctors later informs us that they received a call from Singapore asking about how to donate for the blogger. Basically, the show paints her as a woman who isn’t herself without her trusty laptop and blog. So what is the big deal?

My frustration with the show was the fact that they chose to take blogging as only one thing. There was no discussion of blogging other than the type that this woman did – considered ‘life journal-ing’. First, yes, there are probably plenty of women who have blogs and use them just like the woman in the show. They share every detail, some very personal, and use it for publicity. Unfortunately, this paints a poor picture of the blogging world and makes it difficult to help people to understand the other sides of blogging. For me,  this type of blogger is nothing more than a bored woman who can’t deal with intimacy in her own life so she chooses to share it with the rest of the world instead. By the end of the show, I was not only irritated with the woman, but disappointed with the show itself in that it would allow such a poor version of ‘bloggers’ to be broadcast to millions of viewers. Blogging obviously can be just a journal of your thoughts, but that is a stereotype that I fight against every day. When we discuss blogging, most of our clients (and unfortunately friends too) think we mean the type of blogging portrayed in the show. They have a hard time separating the fact that while there are ‘life’ bloggers, that business bloggers are just as important, and can make a huge impact in their industry with the right strategies. In fact, were one of the top business bloggers to share that they needed a liver, they would probably get the same response this woman did. You make connections with your readers through your writing, but that doesn’t mean it has to be personal writing.

On a side note, I found it funny that the blog service she used was a fake – I figured wordpress, blogger or typepad might have jumped at the opportunity to be featured on a hit show…wonder if Fox even reached out to them…

Did you see the show? What do you think about the way it represented bloggers?