Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
Another change I’ve made recently is add my full name to both my syndication feeds and to the weblog pages.
Perhaps I’ll be more careful with what I write, now that my name is so prominently attached to the pages. Or I’ll feel more ownership of what I write, I don’t know. But I want to begin the process of nudging Burningbird to the side; I am no superhero, and don’t need a mask to protect my identity.
Last week I received an email from a weblogger I’ve been reading some time, and I totally blanked on his name – I was so used to thinking of him by his weblog name. In fact, I’ve been doing this too much lately, an unfortunate consequence of using an aggregator such as Bloglines or Feedster.
Now that we’re nameless in aggregators, yet another step away from the person, does this make us a little meaner to each other? Do we hurt each other with more impunity? Dammit, I don’t know the names of half the webloggers I read. That doesn’t seem right.
In fact, I remember someone suggesting a while back that all non-anonymous webloggers attach our names to our syndication feeds, just so we don’t forget who the people are behind the links. That was a good idea and I should have made my ‘name’ change then.
I am Shelley Powers. I write a weblog called “Burningbird”. Now who are you?