I do understand that people can have a range of perfectly rational reasons for having anonymous blogs, for example people who are concerned that they could lose their jobs if their true identity were known.
Such as the anonymous waiter behind the long-established and compulsively readable Waiter Rant.
And see the fascinating array of blogs at Work-Related Blogs and News, a site I came across via an article by Heather Green in BusinessWeek Online -Workblogging Blog: A Treasure Trove of Anonymous Blogs - where she describes the site as follows:
The blogs tend to organize by similar jobs or writing styles. There are groups of teachers, groups of healthcare workers, groups of police and EMTs, groups of call center employees. It’s hard to know from reading them how much of these blogs are true and how much are fiction. But they’re great reading.
Great reading indeed. And all the ones I checked out were anonymous - that is, they had an obviously “made-up” nickname, with little or no bio information. When you read some of the blogs there you understand why, if they are true rather than fiction, the authors are being quite smart in not revealing their identity.
But I find it surprising and sometimes irritating to come across a blog which looks and reads as if it is meant to be a serious contender as a business blog, but gives no indication of who the owner is.
Or where the link to the “about” page is not obvious.
Or where you can find the “about” link but when you get to the page it is a basic blurb about a company, such as you would get in a brochure, but with nothing to give you a clue about who the “I” is of the blog posts.
Why put all the effort in, if no one except your family and a few close friends can work out who you are?
I raised this issue of the anonymous or practically anonymous business blog with some colleagues recently. From a couple of comments I received, it appears that sometimes, even when people have put plenty of work into setting up and posting to their blogs, they just haven’t got around to providing some information about who they are, why they are blogging and what they are planning to provide in the blog.
For anyone authoring a business blog, a suggestion would be to ask a colleague or friend who hasn’t seen the blog before to check it out and provide some feedback, especially about their impression of how informative the blog is about the writer or writer.
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