Editor’s note (April 2025): This article is part of the Blog Herald’s editorial archives. Originally published in 2007, it has been revised and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance for today’s readers.
There is a story that I am continuing. A mother calls her three-year-old son “kid” – warm, casual, kind. He looks up at her and says: I am not a child, I am a people.
This small tweak provides more information than most content strategy I’ve come across. The child intuitively understood something that we try to remember his career: the word is not a person. The category is not the person in it.
Liz Strauss simply put it in 2007: “We use words to help us group people effectively, but sometimes grouping ignores the individuals in the groups.” This was written in the early days of blogging, when the question of what we called and addressed readers was just beginning to matter. In 2025, this is more important than ever.
From readers to eyeballs: how audience language has shaped us
The vocabulary of digital publishing has always carried assumptions. We are talking about traffic, reach, impressions, conversions. We segment by demographics, device, funnel stage. We call people users, visitors, subscribers, leads.
None of these words are correct. But each of them does something subtle: they make a person into a function. The reader becomes the metric they represent. The subscriber becomes the risk of failure that they may have.
The early blogosphere, for all its chaos, got something right about it. The comment section was a conversation. Blogroll was a community. When Strauss wrote that she didn’t want to be an eyeball—a sister, a friend, a mother, a writer—she was expressing a resistance that many creators felt but couldn’t name. Platforms were no longer learning to look at people, but through them.
We’ve spent years building more advanced versions of the same problem.
What is the data cycle costing us?
Today’s publishing tools are extraordinary in size. Google Analytics 4 tells you session duration, scroll depth, engagement rate. Email platforms are segmented by open behavior, click patterns, predicted lifetime value. Social algorithms optimize for signals related to retention – not for any actual human experience.
The irony is that all this information can make the audience in general feel little who knows You have ten thousand readers and you know their average dwell time. You know next to nothing about what brought them here or what they really need.
Brands and creators with the most loyal audiences treat data as a starting point, not a summary. They use metrics to identify, not to answer, questions. A number tells you something is happening. A conversation with a real person explains why.
Strauss made this point with quiet precision: “All we have to do is ask one person in the group we are considering, and we will know what error we have accepted.” This is not anti-information advice. This corrects the illusion that association is the same as understanding.
The creative economy has its own version of this problem
A new layer of abstraction has arrived in the form of the creative economy’s own vocabulary. Creators now have audiences, communities, tribes, fans. They build personal brands, grow followers, value their niches.
Each of these terms does a useful job. But they also encourage creators to think about the people they serve as a collective rather than as individuals. You optimize content for your audience. You deliver to your community. The language of scale permeates even the most intimate publishing contexts.
Blogs that generate meaningful results involve real reader engagement, not just posting frequency or SEO techniques. Knowing who you’re actually writing for really and specifically shapes the case in a way that keyword research alone can’t.
This is what names do that categories do not. A name connects you to a certain person. A category allows you to generalize indefinitely.
Naming as an act of respect
There is something worth sitting in observing that the first word most of us learn is our own name. Before we understand demographics or content verticals or audience segments, we understand who we are someone — distinguishable, special, cannot be replaced by the person next to us.
A good publisher appreciates this. Not by discarding data or ignoring strategy, but by keeping the individual at the center of the imagination. Who is this piece really for? Not “25-34 year old millennial content creators”, but the specific person you describe when you write.
Platforms will continue to see your readers as signals. Algorithms will continue to optimize for behavioral patterns, not humans. This pressure does not go away. That’s why the choice to write as if you’re talking to a person—not a persona, not a segment, not a slice of a demographic—is increasingly a form of differentiation.
What does this mean for how you post?
The practical change is smaller than it seems. This does not require abandoning analytics or stopping audience segmentation altogether. This requires keeping a counterweight in your mind: behind every data point is a person with a name, a context, and a life that goes far beyond their interaction with your content.
Some of the most lasting publishing relationships I’ve seen start with creators responding to every comment in their early days—not because it’s expanded, but because it builds a habit of seeing individual people. This habit forms the voice, depth and instinct of what really matters.
Liz Strauss wrote in 2007 that the humanity of the virtual and physical world comes from remembering that we each have a name. This is still true. In an age where content is increasingly produced on an industrial scale—by teams, by automation, by systems designed to maximize output—the choice to write like you know who you’re talking to is one of the quieter craft forms available to any blogger.
Sometimes we need a three-year-old to remind us of the obvious: we’re human, not data points. It is worth acting as if we believe it.
