gbd (crispy)

i don't know. i think you're trapped in a "big journalism" model of credibility etc. to me there's no reason one shouldn't be able to blog anonymously, and many reasons why one might want to. in fact there are anonymous blogs of soldiers or whistle-blowers etc (look at this anonymous blog dedicated to disseminating images of abuse of prisoners and non-combatants in iraq, or crisis pictures . check out this story about using anonymous blogs to overcome the info squeeze in nepal or this one about what happens to non-anonymous bloggers in iran).  but a blog is not a magazine: it's a publicly-accessible diary. and really as with many ways of participating in the internet, identities can't really be checked. but that is a factor in how free-wheeling the discourse is. several bloggers believe they have been fired for blogging (or this). most bloggers don't have fact-checkers or a squad of reporters, though well-read blogs get pretty damn quickly corrected and re-corrrected.