Earlier this week I was feeling a bit frustrated about one thing and another, and decided that some of these frustrations might have made an interesting post. On reflection, I decided not to write the post, primarily because I blog under my real name (although I don’t make my surname explicit, it should be easy enough to find from the data available on this site, plus there’s plenty here to identify me to anyone who actually knows me).

I made a conscious decision not to conceal my identity when I started this weblog. It was quite a tempting idea, but ultimately I felt that it might encourage me to be a little more thoughtful when it came to writing stuff to put here if I knew that it would be associated with me directly. Not that I ever envisiage writing anything that at the time I’d feel uncomfortable about being associated with – the reason I decided against posting my frustrations this week were pragmatic rather than anything else. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be associated with them, more that I felt that the consequences of making them public might be detrimental to me.

But it got me thinking about the whole issue of blogging anonymously/pseudonymously. I reckon that this must be an issue which has met with some discussion across the blogosphere at times, and I’m sure that I’ve come accross such debates in the past. Fortunately it is, and a quick google brings up a debate from last summer between people like Instapundit, Steven Den Beste and Demosthenes. This particular debate focuses mostly on those who are pseudonymous and comment upon political issues; another blogger, moxie, points out that anonymity/pseudonymity is something that might be useful if you intend to comment more on your everyday life, rather than on the affairs of the Great and the Good and what we should think and do about them.

I found it quite gratifying to plonk “anonymous blogging” into google and get such an interesting selection of posts on the first page. I have to admit that I didn’t delve any further, there were something like 18,000 results for the search. I did wonder though what the results would have been like if I’d been searching on a topic which hadn’t attracted the attention of relatively high profile bloggers. I suppose I could have refined the search string a bit more, and perhaps spent some time searching wthin my results; it’s difficult to tell without some serious effort into researching the issue. I can’t help but think that standard web searches are a difficult way to bring up old blog posts though. It will be interesting to see what Google do now that they have acquired Blogger – will we see some kind of equivalent to google groups, a web gateway to searching the archives of everyone signed up for a blogger blog? Will there be an equivalent of X-No-Archive? Does anyone care?

This is interesting because of the problems of finding stuff in the blogosphere. Googling is always going to bring up the large, high traffic blogs like Instapundit, and unless you are particularly interested in a subject that’s what you’re going to see. If you want to know what a specific blogger has said on a subject, for the most part you are left with the almost impossible task of picking your way through their archives, unless they offer a search facility for them. For most of us, blogging is currently an ephemeral source of debate and information. Once posts drop from your front page, they’re difficult to find again once you’ve been writing stuff for a while. Given the steadily increasing numbers of blogs and the sheer amount of information and comment that this implies, is this ever going to be something about which anything can be done?

Possibly. The concept of the semantic web seems to offer some hope of solving this sort of problem. It’s something that I’m barely aware of right now, but it looks interesting, and the networking of blogs and similar sites with technologies like trackback, rss and rdf look like steps towards a web where finding related information might become easier. I’m going to continue looking and maybe write a bit more about this. In the meantime, any pointers to good, entry-level discussion of this type of thing are more than welcome.