"Don't do that."

About When I began this blog, not for one minute did I consider whether it should be anonymous or not. Giving it this title aligned it directly with my online id at the time which linked it to my name in place like Metafilter.  But this was never going to be an especially personal blog, largely because I didn't really know why I was starting it in the first place. But at the time it didn't matter.  Relatively speaking blogging was so far out of the mainstream it was effectively anonymous anyway because I was the only person I knew who even understood what the mess of reverse dated text actually was.

 If I had decided to be anonymous, I'm not sure I would have been very good at it, certainly not as good as Brooke, who managed to evade detection for years, well into the publication of a book based on her blog and even a television adaptation.  On her new blog, she outlines some of the steps she took so that Belle de Jour remained an enigma:

"Are you posting photos? Exif data can tell people, among other things, where and when a picture was taken, what it was taken with, and more. I never had call to use it because I never posted photos or sound, but am told there are loads of tools that can wipe this Exif data from your pictures (here's one)."

"The content of what you post can be a giveaway as well. Are you linking to people you know in real life? Are you making in-jokes or references to things only a small group of people will know about? Don't do that."

All of which said, it's still possible to be relatively anonymous without being actually anonymous.  Most people don't know what my job is.  Which these days isn't necessarily a help, but anyway.  Yes.