anonymity

A sad exchange over at SKB. Metropulse publisher Brian Conley threatened to “out” SouthknoxBubba, a pretty popular anonymous blogger:

Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 12:36:18 -0400
Subject: Re: Molly and Ellen
From: “Brian Conley” [[email protected]]
To: [email protected]

Mr. Neal:

If I wanted to manipulate you, I’d threaten to run a cover story on bank software designers and the blogs they create, complete with names, photographs, personal credit histories, police records, addresses, excerpts of their political rantings, etc.. But I wouldn’t do that, now would I? Anonymity really shouldn’t be abused.

Brian

Pretty pathetic, but kudos for SKB for taking a risky step and beating him to the punch and going public. Anonymity is certainly something that I’ve found appealing over the years. The amount of info you can glean about me, both public and personal, from a simple a simple google search is astounding. As one commenter over at SKB noted, Google never forgets, and Conley’s is the career that will suffer for this, not SKB’s.