Anonymous blogs are undeniably the blondes of the blogosphere: They have more fun. Look at TMFTML, Eurotrash, Belle de Jour, d-nasty, Old Hag and early Salam Pax, just for starters. They are funnier, meaner, not to be relied upon, and just more shameless in their obsessions, and we who have inadvertently accrued blogs upon which our reputations rest fantasize wildly about the posts we could write if only we had that fling with anonymity.

What blonde blogs lack in credibility, they make up for in entertainment. And because they’re anonymous, they’re also more frank, with far more shortcomings flaunted than in “reputable” blogs. They’re seductive like nothing else, though you know they may well be leading you on.

For those who take their taxonomy seriously, let’s be clear: this class of blogs comprises those where the author’s real name is difficult to find for the general reader or an intended target (family, boss, friend or genocidal despot). All the authors in this class claim to be writing as themselves, but a subclass is in fact lying to us.

It is in this subclass that we find room for a refreshing kind of fiction. Belle de Jour, the diary of a London call girl, is likely the first break-out success of this genreAn earlier blog, The Disappearance of Isabella V, was too badly researched to be credible.. Even if BdJ turns out to have been written by an actual prostitute instead of by you or me, the blogosphere is ripe for this experiment, where reading means having to divine whether writing is fictional or documentary. It inoculates the reader with a healthy skepticism towards knowledge claims of all kinds, and this is always a Good Thing.

So this class of blogs is innovative, but not without historical precedent. In Stranger Shores, J.M. Coetzee writes an essay about Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, from which it is worth quoting at length:

Properly speaking, Defoe is a realist only in that he is an empiricist, and empiricism is one of the tenets of the realist novel. Defoe is in fact something simpler: an impersonator, a ventriloquist, even a forger (his Journal of the Plague Year is as close to a forgery of an historical document as one can get without beginning to play with ink and old paper). The kind of ‘novel’ he is writing (he did not, of course, use the term) is a more or less literal imitation of the kind of recital his hero or heroine would have given had he or she really existed. It is fake autobiography heavily influenced by the genres of the deathbed confession and the spiritual autobiography.

I don’t know if many who read Robinson Crusoe in 1719 fell for this literary ruse, but I suspect many did notThe writings of Defoe and the author of BdJ (if she’s not real) are not to be confused with the roman á clef or anonymously authored fiction clearly marked as such, like Primary Colors.. By appropriating the newly minted conventions of the blog, the Defoean narrative is finally empowered with the ability to credibly sustain fiction as fact over a prolonged period of time despite the close scrutiny of readers. In theory we may never know who writes an anonymous blog, and the illusion, if that is what it is, can be tweaked for maximum effect in response to feedbackDefoe, too, played this game, though within the confines of the technology of the day. According to Coetzee,
 
“In his Serious Reflections, the author of the earlier volumes finds it necessary to defend himself against charges that his life-story is made up, that it is simply a romance, that he is not even a real person. ‘I Robinson Crusoe’, he writes in his preface, ‘do affirm that the story, though allegorical, is also historical…'”.

All this sounds like tremendous amounts of fun; it sounds like a different kind of fun than can be had with a group blog or a blog like this one. Perhaps, to experience blogging in all its guises, the well-rounded blogger will soon want to dabble in all three forms. I can think of at least one more genre innovation, however: The anonymous group blog — which should be wonderful for those with multiple personality disorder(s).