Blogs have many faces and some of them are more like clown masks - blog is becoming a popular medium for having a little fun with the credulous. The more frequent the postings, the more they respond to reader feedback and the more interesting the subject matter, the more people are drawn into the fiction. Alex Boese, who runs the Museum of Hoaxes, an online compendium of urban legends and other fakery says:

It kind of takes the old phenomenon of literary hoaxes a step further, where you're interacting with these authors day by day. And it's so easy to hide your identity online and to hide the contextual clues that people would need to find out who you are.

It seems that blogs are still new enough that skepticism about their authenticity has not yet set in.

Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion doubts that veteran blog readers can be easily cought out although a trusted friends' referral can get even experienced readers let their guard down.

If a friend passed you the Web address, then you definitely think it's true because you're talking about word of mouth. If you think about it there are sites that are blogs that look like professional news outlets that you would never know that they're written by amateurs.

A variety of hoaxes have spiced up the so-called blogosphere. Among them are Andy Kaufman Returns , in which an unidentified writer purports to be the eccentric comedian, reappearing 20 years after his death; Rance, the musings of an anonymous Hollywood star; and Jane's Blog, the daily diary of a starry-eyed, oversexed young woman in Los Angeles who turns out to be a fictional character on the Oxygen TV sitcom "Good Girls Don't."

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