Ernie’s 3D Pancakes has a post on anonymous academic bloggers. To me, this is an interesting question. I use my own name everywhere on this blog. You can easily figure out where I work, what I teach and to whom, where I publish and so on. You can even find who my son is and so on. I think that Jeff correctly points out that feeling you need to be anonymous is probably misguided. The likelyhood that a colleague is going to come to my blog, read it, be insulted, and try to hurt me on the job, is very, very slim. One reason for that is that I would never bad mouth a colleague on my blog: it just wouldn’t be fun and interesting for my target audience. The likelyhood that a reviewer of a paper I submitted would come on my blog and be insulted and reject my paper is also very slim. However, reviewers have many more reasons to wrongly reject a paper and if you start worrying about this sort of thing, you are not out of the woods!
So, I use my own name. There.
I agree. I wonder if there’s a male/female split. As a woman I cheer myself up by talking about
my emotional state, and I wouldn’t be very happy about male colleagues reading that.
I’ve now definitively solved the problem. I’ve got a personal public blog, a
semi-public personal blog and a top secret personal blog. 🙂 I don’t think I could have any more if I tried. 🙂