What's with group blog writers using the first person plural all the time? Take this example from Apartment Therapy Home Tech:

We don't have children yet but all of our friends that do keep telling us how many batteries they go through for their kids toys. Currently, we use rechargable batteries for our gadgets, but what about wind powered toys? For $30, a wind powered RC car kit from Japan can run for 3 and a half minutes after sitting in a 5 mph wind for 5 minutes. Cool concept, but we suspect all that waiting around for wind charging will become very old very fast for a young child. If only the run time was longer than the charge time.

The only way this really makes sense is if the author is talking about his household - for example, he and his wife. But everyone on this website writes this way all the time. In the end, I think this just sounds pretentious. Blog writing is full of editorializing. You don't see newspaper editorials filled with "we"s and "our"s despite the fact that a newspaper is a collaborative publication.

If opinions and personal experience are going to be given, why try to force it to sound impersonal, like it's coming from the blog as a whole and not from an individual person? The impression I get is that these blogs are trying to be friendly and conversational in only the most superficial way, without allowing any of their writers' personalities to peek through. It strikes me as very disingenuous. Yes, it's a group blog, but the posts are written by individuals. And if their individuality is intended to be completely effaced, then they should do away with personal anecdotes or opinions entirely, thus doing away with the pronoun pickle permanently.

(Note: We actually are big fans of the content in Apartment Therapy's many websites — and many other group blogs on which this phenomenon can be observed &mdash but this royal "we" just grates on our last nerve.)