On the web you get to pick your audience. If you are brick & mortar, and you move online, your audience is defined for you. But Internet pure-plays like, oh, say a blogger self-help site, get to pick their audience. Look at the blogger community as a pie, and grab a slice.

So do you want to go after the nicey-nicey bloggers? The newbies? The upper-crusty bloggers? Or maybe the nasty, cult-like ones. Your choice. Pick your poison. And if you have a personality that matches your selected audience, you should do well in serving them.

One caveat that comes to mind today though, is that it is pretty damn hard to hide your true self when you blog. The more you hide it, the less credible you are for your audience. Nobody likes a poser. They’ll rat you out eventually.

What if you don’t hide it, but try and keep it under wraps? Like, pretend you hate bloggers, but want to monetize an audience of bloggers? Pretend you built out a web site to cater to bloggers, and you try and keep your true dislike for them under wraps. I say that will never work.

Every time you slip and reveal a wee bit of that negativity, someone in your audience will identify with that and give you some positive feedback..some positive reinforcement for it. “Dude, you are right about that”. Since most everyone else in the community let that little error of negativity slip (while noting it for the record for later re-evaluation of their trust in you, by the way), the only feedback you got was a reinforcement for the negativity. That stuff starts to work on you. We all need reinforcement.

Over time I guarantee your audience will devolve into an audience of like-minded people. The positive ones will move on, because they pick up on the bad vibe and prefer not to experience it. The others, the ones like you, will come back for more of themselves. More external validation. And there you have it. You reap what you sow.

Since I re-started this blog under my own name I have been reading a few more blogs than usual. It dawns on me that this Internet thing that transformed our work environments, and transformed our careers, has simply removed inhibitions. The latent artists and writers that failed to “be themselves” but instead went onwards with school and traditional jobs, are finding their way (back) to their destinies via the web. Digital photography has helped them rationalize it as well.

You all best be careful, though, because that same society that didn’t pay artists nor writers will similarly attempt to enslave The Webologist.

I have always been a supporter of artists, emotionally and financially when possible. They are amazing. Like most normal people, I have artistic visions, yet lack the skills to express them. So when a free-thinking expressionist doesn’t say “look” and explain something in words, but rather looks away and starts to draw or sketch or paint, or simply goes away, coming back some time later to show me something he created that reflects the original ideas not-excessively-discussed, I think it’s cool.

Of course there are commercial artists. And technicians. And hopeless romantics. And talentless hacks. And gifted ones that self destruct, and not-so-gifted ones that self destruct. It’s funny just how many parallels there are between web thought pioneers and “traditional” artists.