Sign Your Name Please

I was having a conversation last week with the editor of the Burner Blog about how much I dislike it when group-edited blogs use a generic signature on posts. I used the CTI blog Out of Ur as an example.

If I read your blog regularly, I develop a relationship with your editors and learn their voices, paying special attention to my favorites. This process of me bonding with your content creators is frustrated when you obscure their name from me. Also, it keeps me from finding other stuff on the web that they have written that I might enjoy and inhibits their professional development.

Finally it contributes to the notion many people have carried with them from the earliest years of the internet, that somehow what you write and who you are on the web are separate from who you are in real life.  Most of us have changed our email addresses from goofykid1776@hotmail.com to something resembling our real name.  I suggest that we carry the same idea forward in our blogs and sign our name to what we write, and if that feels uncomfortable, then it might be time to reconsider what we have written or where we are posting.