8 June 06

Why it's important to have your photo on your blog

One of the best articles I have read on blogging was posted a few months ago – I really wish that I’d bookmarked it now, but at the time I thought it wasn’t relevant (I wasn’t blogging at the time). One of the main four points of the article was the fact that you should always include a photo on your site somewhere. I can’t remember the other points now, but this point always stuck with me because I’d never heard anyone say it before. Even though I always knew that putting a photo somewhere on the site was at least a good option, I never thought, up until then, that it was an essential thing to have.

Through my years of blog readings, I seem to enjoy the bloggers who gave a bit more of involvement and opinion into their blogs (which I talked about before) but one of the more frustating things about some blogs was a lack of knowing who they were. Sure, anyone can make themselves sound good on an about page – the best bloggers would know how to talk themselves up. But there’s nothing more personal than seeing whose blog you’re reading. (Maybe apart from meeting them. Or having sex with them.)

Obviously, people can lie in their photo. There’s nothing more annoying than bloggers who have their face partly hidden, or have huuuge sunglasses on, or have photos which are photoshopped to death. It’s like they know they’re supposed to have a photo up there but they’re not too happy with it. It’s okay for their innermost thoughts to be online, but not their face.

One of the main offenders for me personally was when I saw Shaun Inman at a conference. Shaun Inman, for those that don’t know, makes the Mint web-stats tool and is a quite famous blogger. Now, from his photo on his site, he looks late-20s / early-30s and about 6 foot. In real life, he looked much younger and smaller. Obviously, I’m not trying to pick on Shaun here too much, but it was quite disappointing. A bit like seeing how ordinary a celeb would look in real life, after seeing them on screens for years. But no one wants to look small and young, do they?

When I had to give a photo in for my .net magazine article, I picked something that made me a bit cool, and a bit sexy. As sexy as someone featured in .net can be. In the end, it made me look like a bit of tit. “You look like a geek trying a bit too hard” was the response from James. Now I’m kind of not looking forward to my next .net article as it’ll feature that same photo again, but bigger and in a few more places. It’s not a good representation of me. It’s false, and that’s why now I have a more realistic photo of my mug on the about page.

If you’re going to have a photo, make sure it looks real. A good example is Om Malik’s photo. I bet he looks exactly like that in real life. I bet Jonathan Snook looks like he does on his blog. So please bloggers, try to keep it real!

Enjoy this? Subscribe to the feed for the very latest updates.