Tuesday, March 01, 2005
Anonymity, a disclaimer, and a couple of policies
[Please respect our anonymity.] Traffic around here has been growing month after month, for which I'm extremely grateful and pleased. As readership grows, though, so does controversy. Accordingly, I am slightly increasing the anonymity coefficient around my posts. Henceforth, I will only use the pen name "TigerHawk" in the tag line and in the email address down below the phases of the moon in the right sidebar.
I appreciate that there are many of you who know who I am, either in meat space or because I have not really disguised my identity up until now. No problem. I have made many friends through blogging, and I have no reason to believe that anybody out there would do me harm. However, if you do know who I am, I would appreciate it if you didn't "out" me on the Web. Somebody out there may not be so charitable.
[Our opinions are our own, and nobody else's.] It is also high time that I issued a disclaimer: The opinions I express here are my own, and do not represent the opinions of my employer, or any of its officers and directors. Heck, they don't even represent my opinions a couple of days after I've written them, so fer chrissakes don't assume that any of us -- me, Charlottesvillain, or co-bloggers to be named later -- are speaking for each other or for anybody that we work for. We write for our own enjoyment and enlightenment, and because there are matters of the world about which we care deeply.
[Policies on updates and commenting.] We have a couple of policies on updates. First, we will correct posts to fix obvious typographical errors without indicating that they have been updated. We see no reason to confess to minor errors of typing or proofreading. Second, we will note correcting updates when we have made a substantive error. If we were dumb, we will muster the courage to correct our ways transparently. Third, we allow ourselves a short grace period to correct other errors in posts -- generally speaking, under an hour. This is because we are sometimes in a hurry, but if we write a silly sentence and fix it quickly and before anybody calls us out, we see no reason to confess our own stupidity. Fourth, we have been blessed with civil commenters, and hope to have many more of them participate. However, it is our space, and if your comments are not in good faith we will delete them. Occasional expletives are allowed -- we are not bluenoses -- but since many of our readers prefer not to read endless "bad words" we ask that you keep it reasonably clean (of course, if something is funny enough by our fairly low-brow standards, we will cut it a lot of slack).
Comments are unmoderated. We may occasionally delete a comment, but our failure to delete a comment or to suffer a comment to exist should not be taken as an endorsement of that comment. We may well be as offended as you are.
[Advertising.] We use third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our website. These companies may use information (not including your name, address, email address, or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used by these companies, click here.
That's it for now. We hope you keep coming back!
5 Comments:
By 
Jody, at
Tue Mar 01, 12:26:00 AM:
I like your policies, especially the one about your ever changing opinions. It is good that I am not the only one. Congrats on the heavy traffic, it's always nice to see a quality blog do well. Maybe I will start signing my comments as anonymous to keep up with the theme, what do you think?
:)
By TigerHawk, at
Tue Mar 01, 06:53:00 AM:
Actually, you are making an intersting point. In the blogosphere, there is a difference between the use of a pen name and simply posting as "Anonymous." In the latter case, it makes it tough for people to separate one commenter from another. If people use pen names, though, they retain the personalities that they reflect in their writing. That distinction has always existed I suppose -- we know that "George Eliot" is a pen name, but that it reflects a different writer than "Mark Twain." I guess it is just that the technique has gone from rare to universal with the advent of blogging and commenting.
By trejrco, at
Tue Mar 01, 09:54:00 AM:
There is a huge difference between anonymous and a pen-name / alias / nic / handle / whatever you want to call it.
IMHO, posting as anonymous instantly devalues your comments greatly.
Also - even disregarding the 'personality' aspect, posting with an alias greatly simplifies a 'conversation'; permits separate threads in comment sections, etc.
/TJ
NIFThe Wide Awakes
By Cassandra, at
Thu Jun 01, 10:43:00 AM:
By Unknown, at
Mon Dec 07, 09:29:00 AM:
Your ad covers the left side of the screen, obscuring your text...so I cannot read your text and I cannot make the ad go away.
Are you trying to sabotage your own blog?
