"It wasn't me" - Anon.

I dont have much to say on the subject of anonymity (but lets face it I rarely stay on topic so its hardly going to matter now is it?) but I will say this. While the Qian and Scott article 'Anonymity and Self-Disclosure on Weblogs' did have some interesting and valid points, my response to the overall concept of the article was a highly intellectual "well...yeah..."
It seems fairly obvious to me that if I didn't know who was reading this I would probably go ahead and write more about the consequences of the 'get a myspace' game and probably be not quite as enthusiastic about the word 'heck' (oh who am I kidding I'd be more enthusiastic about it). Actually I doubt I'd even pretend to be almost writing about new media communication. Actually i probably wouldn't be blogging at all.
One thing I realised I have been doing throughout my blogging is protecting the identities of everyone i have mentioned without even thinking about it. I can vaguely understand why i would refer to people as " a friend" etc, but the one that has me scratching my head is the notorious 'Fred'. Now why oh why would I protect the identity of somebody who's identity I don't actually know? My original thought was that i respected that since he's going for visual anonymity I subconciously offered him the courtesy of discursive anonymity (brownie points?) but deep down i know thats not true. Its an irrational paranoia that he will somehow stumble across my blog (who knows blog trawling could be one of his mysterious hobbies) and be highly offended that I've forgotten who he is after all those happy years we spent together at school.