Ok – it’s occurred to all of us at one time or another – weblogging is based upon the presumption of authenticity – people actually writing about their own lives. But this presumed authenticity is almost certainly to a greater or lesser extent a fantasy – while I’m sure most webloggers don’t lie about their lives, I’d be surprised if people were not selectively choosing what to write about in such a way that would alter people’s perceptions of their life.
So I’m sure it’s occurred to many of us at certain times to set up fictional weblogs – to generate completely articificial online personae. I know that it’s occurred to Matt and Nick because they’ve both talked about it with me. But what no one has yet talked about is undertaking weblogs of already established fictional characters. I mean – it would be a tremendous fan site for Buffy to have a weblog ostensibly maintained by Willow, with links and commentary based around what happened to her in the latest episode. And from a more literary perspective, a weblog based upon Sherlock Holmes writing each day about his cases (assembling itself into a chronology of the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) might be both interesting and academically valuable. Are there any weblogs like this out there? If not, why not?