Anonymity ☆

Over the past few days a RailsConf I’ve been considering whether it’s better to create an online presence with a pseudonym or my real name. I’ve met two brilliant people over the past few days who I’ve felt a really great connection with, Craig Mackenzie and Dann Tripp. They both publish their blogs under their own, full names. This is something that I’ve always been slightly worried about doing. However, I’ve been thinking over the past few days that perhaps I should do the same.

To be honest I’ve never known what, if anything, I should publish on a blog. Who am I talking to, is this just for me and are people going to think I’m a complete idiot by saying what I’m saying? Whilst I think I’m good at conveying ideas whilst chatting to people (and hopefully I am, it’s kind of what I do for a job) I’m not sure I’m particularly good at putting things in writing. I always seem to spend ages reading over what it is that I’ve written and ending up thinking it’s a load of old cobblers and discarding it. I mean you are publishing, admitidly only potentially, to the whole world and I find that a quite a intimidating thought.

There are plenty of people who do just communicate with the world only using their pseudonym, take for example Why the Lucky Stiff writer, cartoonist, musician, artist, and computer programmer who has built an online and offline name for himself by being immensely creative. Involved with creating free content and learning materials, particularly within the Ruby community.

Then take Ze Frank, who (as far as I can tell from my very limited knowledge) became particularly famous for his How to dance properly piece which he sent to a small number of friends as an invite to his 29th-ish birthday party. Within a week I think more than a million people had viewed his invite.

Since then he’s built an incredible online presence for himself. I suggest you check him out he seems like an incredible person with wonderful insights into life and he’s as funny as fxck. He spoke yesterday evening at RailsConf and talked about his analogy between the current blogging explosion and children drawing on a play school floor, finding their feet and enjoying exploring their ability to express themselves in this new way, although not knowin exactly what they are creating.

Is all this new content good? Of course not, most of it looks rubbish and the information can be disjointed and irrelevant at best. Look at MySpace for really bad examples, but at least people are trying and experimenting with expressing themselves (even if MySpace is the most God awful attrocity the web has ever seen!). Surely a go at generating some content is better than nothing. After all, it could be good.

What I think I might have to do is practice writing for a while, find my feet expressing myself in this form. Perhaps I’ll put my full name to this diatribe of nonsense at some point when I feel comfortable doing so – and want to pimp my ass off! Until then I think I’m simply going to have to be Ant, with my head in the clouds!

BLAH, BLAH, BLAH!!!