If ever a blogger should remain anonymous and work under a pseudonym, it’s me. But I don’t and following some of my blogs where I have a go at the Frenchies, I wake the next day expecting the usual French custom of protest to take its normal form of a ton of rotting fish dumped in my drive (the cats would love it), burning lamb or beef cattle on my terraces (Shadow would love that) or a fisherman’s trawler blockade (pretty difficult that one!). Still – maybe I’ll get lucky and some stroppy French git who’s taken umbrage at something I’ve written will dump a couple of tons of dung, sorry, manure, on my property – it’ll be great for the plants.
But seriously, there’s been a bit of debate in the UK recently about the anonymity of bloggers. The main case was about a serving police officer who, under the pseudonym of ‘NightJack’, informed his readers of the sorts of things which happened in the murky world of the police and the courts.
The second case was about a lady, under the pseudonym of Abby Lee, who wrote a blog called, ‘Girl With a One Track Mind’ and who described in enormous detail, her sexual experiences, of which there were many!
Both blogs were widely read, indeed Abby Lee actually published a book which I believe was hugely successful and as Abby, she won many blogging awards.
However, the UK press, never one to leave any good thing alone, ‘outed’ both bloggers to their readers and their anonymity was finished.
Both authors worked under pseudonyms for different reasons. Abby just wanted anonymity due to the type of material she wrote and explained that she’d never be left alone, particularly by predatory men, if she blogged under her real name. Nightjack, spilt the beans on quite a few controversial cases, and although he changed the names of those involved and tried, as best he could, to make sure no real cases could be identified from his blogs, as a serving police officer, it was against his contract of employment to write about his work.
Abby (actually Zoe Margolis aged 37) was ‘outed’ three years ago and although she still rails against the junior journalist working for the Times newspaper who tracked her down and published her real name and other details of her upbringing and her life, she has benefited enormously from the publicity, now travelling the world and appearing on a variety of talk shows and sex advice panels.
Nightjack was also outed by the Times a few weeks ago but for Richard Horton, the policeman blogger, the result was rather different. His blog had to be shut down and he was given a written warning by his superiors.
Bloggers and blogging are now a significant area of interest to me and I can sympathise with both Abby and Richard in their quest to remain anonymous. It’s entirely their choice that they did not want their real names to be published for different reasons, whereas from my perspective, whilst I could have worked under a pseudonym, I chose not to.
One family who blog about ‘life in France’ and who live in the next village, remain stubbornly anonymous although they include family pictures and other details which would allow the Times to track them down in a nanosecond. Why do they blog anonymously? It’s not as if they publish really nasty stuff – the most controversial thing they’ve mentioned recently is their dislike of the music played in McDonalds and yet they blog anonymously. Why ? I suppose it’s their decision and I respect it but I’d just like to know why. I’ve even invited them, through a comment on their site, to a ‘bloggers evening’ at my house (how sad is that?) but I never even got a reply. Still – as I say –each to their own.
PS – I forgot that I’ve been blogging for one year now. 243 posts and going strong!
PPS – a showbiz blog has just been sold for $10 million – bet he or she wasn’t blogging anonymously.
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