Anonymity automatically lowers the quality of Web log postings. Until human beings do some currently-unforeseeable evolving, we will continue to want to "place" the people to whom we’re listening and talking. The difference between a sixty year-old man and a thirty year-old woman is not altogether without significance, particularly where personal responses (by which I don’t mean "intimate" ones) are salient. So are all the other small characteristics that distinguish us.

Secrecy and publication don’t go together. The well-written roman à clef may be irresistible, but few Web logs are likely to attain such distinction. In general, I’m not interested in the details of a hated job, much less those of a troubled romance, so anonymity in these areas doesn’t bother me. But where matters of a general, private or public intellectual nature, I really can’t see that anonymity is justified. Perhaps I’m being naive; perhaps I put stock in the likelihood that my dependence upon semicolons will repel troublemakers.

I do realize that women are bound to feel somewhat more cautious about revealing their identities.