Blogging: Don’t forget your paper bag

Atrios advises new bloggers to do what he did for as long as circumstances allowed: blog anonymously. For a while, at least.

There’s a distinction between private/public figure which isn’t always perfectly clear, but it’s something that the internet totally destroys. If you write something on the internet, it’s public. A big blog links to it, suddenly you go from 50 hits per day to 5000 in one day. 5 hours later, CNN puts it on their “inside the blogs” segment, and suddenly you’ve gone national to a non-blog reading audience who are perhaps unaware of conventions of blogging.

I think that until you blog for awhile it’s hard to quite get a handle on how much you want to be public versus being private, and how easily blogging and the internet and the media can tear down that wall in a way you never expected.

Good advice on the whole, though a little late for yours truly. I just had an experience much like Atrios’ hypothetical with my original Memin Pinguin post of last week. Michelle Malkin unexpectedly links to it and booyah! My daily hits go from the low two hundreds to thirteen hundred to thirty-two hundred. CNN somehow overlooked me, which is fine, but Brian Montopoli at CJR Daily did give me a nod in his Blog Report (he called me “angry,” which makes me smile - I thought my post was quite restrained).

The spike in traffic was just that, resembling a rock statue in a sand garden on my stats graph. Three days later, visitation was back to normal, which is pretty much what I expected. The Mexican postage stamp story is the kind of brief-but-intense disturbance you get with inflammatory stories that really have nowhere to go. Either Mexico says “Oopsie, racist-ass stamps, our bad,” and withdraws them, or they say (as they did) “Our culture, our stamps, our business and none of yours,” in which case everyone’s already said their piece and people move on to the next story-of-the-moment.

Regarding the kind of traffic you get from this kind of flurry, and the consequences thereof: my situation was much happier than the one Atrios seems to suggest. I got a couple of hostile emails and some mixed comments, and that was it. By and large, visitors wiped their feet at the door before coming in, and that’s about all you can ask of guests. In any event, I don’t seem to have taken any harm by writing under my own name (which is easy enough to locate here if you really want to find it).

Still, I can’t argue with Atrios’ suggestion of anonymity for people testing the blog waters, which are cold, murky, and turbulent. And the undertow is a bitch. You’ll irritate some people who’ll say anonymity undermines credibility on a given subject, but you’re probably the best judge of whether that’s so. Besides, irritating people seems to be a large part of what blogging is all about.

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