Pseudonymous Geeks Make History ...

If you were doing a history of the internet revolution, you'd want to get behind the blogging phenomenon that I wrote about in"Were There Blog Enough and Time" to write about what was happening in the 1990s. A big piece of that puzzle is found in Matt Sharkey's"The Big Fish: Ten Years Later, the Story of Suck.com, the First Great Website" at KeepGoing.org. When you read it, some familiar names turn up – names of people you hadn't thought of in relation to each other, like Ana Marie Cox, who would later become known as Wonkette, and Ambrose Beers, who would later become known as Chris Bray. And, then, there were its readers, like Manan Ahmed, who recommends the piece and says that Suck.com was his first"must read." There's a fascinating discussion of it at Metafilter.

O. K., so Ambrose Beers was a pseudonym. How dim was your bulb if you didn't know that? We had a fairly unpleasant discussion at Cliopatria about bloggers' use of anonymity and pseudonymity the other day. Marilyn Chandler McIntyre writes"In Praise of Anonymity" at Books and Culture. Sixteen months ago, we had a different discussion of Scott McLemee's claim that how one uses one's anonymity or pseudonymity is a good test of character. I've not seen anything before or since to persuade me that he was wrong.