Anonymous Blogging
“Blogging created an ecosystem where people became known for their blog identities.”
-dana boyd
This quote from dana boyd’s article, “A customer Service Nightmare: Resolving Trademark and Personal Reputation in a Limited Name Space”, stuck out to me. Many people utilize pseudonyms online to maintain anonymity and to be unique. Since two people are not allowed to identify with the same username within a website, each user establishes their individuality partially with just the pseudonym. It is easier for me to remember a made up word, such as dana boyd’s “zephoria” username, than it is to remember her actual name. Using these fake names allows the particular user to potentially gain popularity faster. She claims that she “inadvertently built a reputation linked to zephoria”, but that she’s not always allowed to identify with that name because of a cluster of messy rules regarding domain names. Monitoring usernames on such a large scale is definitely a tricky task to accomplish, but hopefully they figure out a new tactic to sort through the mess. Possibly utilizing the list of strategies provided by boyd?
What I also found interesting about this article was the mix of informal and formal speak. Each time she inserted the word “cuz” I was caught off guard, for it seemed out of place in the context of the article. I’m sure that there is a reason for such informal phrases to be included within the article, but for now, I’m not quite sure what that reason is.
