Editor’s note (April 2025): This article is part of Blog Herald’s editorial archive. Originally published in 2007, it has been reviewed and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance for today’s readers.
There’s a story I keep coming back to. A mother calls her three-year-old son “kid” — warm, casual, affectionate. He looks up at her and says: I’m a people, not a kid.
That small correction carries more insight than most content strategy decks I’ve encountered. The child understood something intuitively that we spend careers trying to remember: the word is not the person. The category is not the human being inside it.
Liz Strauss put it simply back in 2007: “We use words to helps us group people efficiently, but sometimes the grouping loses sight of the individual in the groups.” That was written in the early days of blogging, when the question of how we name and address readers was just beginning to matter. In 2025, it matters more than ever.
From readers to eyeballs: how the language of audience shaped us
The vocabulary of digital publishing has always carried assumptions. We speak of traffic, reach, impressions, conversions. We segment by demographics, by device, by funnel stage. We call people users, visitors, subscribers, leads.
None of these words are wrong, exactly. But they each do something subtle: they flatten the person into a function. The reader becomes the metric they represent. The subscriber becomes the churn risk they might become.
The early blogging world, for all its chaos, got something right about this. The comment section was a conversation. The blogroll was a community. When Strauss wrote that she didn’t want to be an eyeball — that she was a sister, a friend, a mother, a writer — she was articulating a resistance that many creators felt but couldn’t name. The platforms were already learning to see through people rather than at them.
We’ve spent the years since building more sophisticated versions of the same problem.
What the data era costs us
Today’s publishing tools are extraordinary at measurement. Google Analytics 4 tells you session duration, scroll depth, engagement rate. Email platforms segment by open behaviour, click patterns, predicted lifetime value. Social algorithms optimise for signals that correlate with retention — not for the experience of any actual person.
The irony is that all this data, in aggregate, can make audiences feel less knowable. You have ten thousand readers and you know their average time-on-page. You know almost nothing about what brought them here or what they actually needed.
The brands and creators with the most loyal audiences treat data as a starting point, not a summary. They use metrics to identify questions, not to answer them. The number tells you something is happening. A conversation with a real person tells you why.
Strauss made this point with quiet precision: “All we have to do is ask one person in the group we’re thinking for, and we’ll know what wrong thing we assumed.” That’s not anti-data advice. It’s a corrective to the illusion that aggregation is the same as understanding.
The creator economy has its own version of this problem
A new layer of abstraction has arrived in the form of the creator economy’s own vocabulary. Creators now have audiences, communities, tribes, fans. They build personal brands, grow followings, deliver value to their niche.
Each of these terms does useful work. But they also nudge creators toward thinking about the people they serve as a mass rather than as individuals. You optimise content for your audience. You deliver for your community. The language of scale infiltrates even the most intimate publishing contexts.
Blogs that generate meaningful results tend to involve real reader relationships — not just publishing frequency or SEO technique. Knowing who you’re actually writing for, concretely and specifically, shapes the work in ways that keyword research alone cannot.
This is what names do that categories don’t. A name anchors you to a particular human being. A category lets you generalise indefinitely.
Naming as an act of respect
There’s something worth sitting with in the observation that the first word most of us learn is our own name. Before we understand demographics or content verticals or audience segments, we understand that we are someone — distinguishable, particular, not interchangeable with the person next to us.
Good publishing honours that. Not by abandoning data or ignoring strategy, but by keeping the individual human being at the centre of the imagination. Who is this piece actually for? Not “millennial content creators aged 25–34,” but the specific person you’re picturing when you write.
The platforms will continue to see your readers as signals. Algorithms will continue to optimise for behaviour patterns rather than for people. That pressure isn’t going away. Which is exactly why the choice to write as if you’re speaking to a person — not a persona, not a segment, not a demographic slice — is increasingly a form of distinction.
What this means for how you publish
The practical shift is smaller than it sounds. It doesn’t require abandoning analytics or stopping all audience segmentation. It requires holding a counterweight in your mind: behind every data point is a person who has a name, a context, and a life that extends far beyond their interaction with your content.
Some of the most durable publishing relationships I’ve observed begin with creators who reply to every comment in their early days — not because it scales, but because it builds the habit of seeing individual people. That habit shapes the voice, the depth, and the instinct for what actually matters.
Liz Strauss wrote back in 2007 that the humanity of the virtual and physical world comes from remembering that each of us has a name. That’s still true. And in an era where content is increasingly produced at industrial scale — by teams, by automation, by systems designed to maximise output — the choice to write as if you know who you’re talking to is one of the quieter forms of craft available to any blogger.
Occasionally, it takes a three-year-old to remind us of the obvious: we’re people, not data points. The work is worth doing as if we believe that.
