What do you think of anonymous blogging?

The days of anonymous blogging might be coming to an end. TechSoup blog reports on artificial intelligence being developed to track people on the Internet, based on how people write. This kind of tracking could have all kinds of implications for both individuals and organizations alike.

What do you think about increased monitoring of individuals online? What can nonprofits do about this?

--Megan

Why should anybody have to be anonym when blogging? If you cant stand for it..then dont write it!

Nils
PayPal fee Calculator

Here's what I would to if I want to blog anonymously.

1. Get a fake email.
2. Sign up a free blog at WordPress.com or Blogger.com
3. Write my posts using anonymous proxies such as proxyfreely.com or proxy305.com

And be sure what you reveal about yourself in your posts. This will take a while to find you.

There are a number of perfectly legitimate reasons to blog anonymously, and I don't know about it coming to an end. Latent semantic indexing is one way of making connections between content online but anonymous bloggers who leave no trace of their identity elsewhere are still shrouded in mystery. There's also the question of what constitutes anonymity. I could use my real name but with any other content regarding me on the web I'd still be technically "anonymous" -- a nobody. There are so many different levels of anonymity, too. Anonymous IP, Anonymous name, Anonymous profile...

Nils, there are often legitimate safety concerns that lead some to blog anonymously, usually a situation where the blogger is prohibited in some ways from free speech (different countries have very different restrictions surrounding this).

I do see your point that you should be able to defend and stand behind anything you write on the web, anonymous or not.

soloruby, you raise a good point about different levels of anonymity. Both organizational bloggers and individual bloggers have to come to a decision on how much to reveal/conceal on a blog, content-wise, profile-wise, etc.

--Megan

I let users post anonymously on my blog all the time. I like to here the difference in opinions, although i use captcha to avoid spam.t1