OneAndOneIs2

I always get slightly paranoid when I see that somebody has come to my website by Googling (yes, I mean via Google itself) for my full name.

Who are these people? Old acquaintances that have eschewed Friends Reunited as a means of tracking me down? People I know today who can remember my name but not my URL? Internet stalkers intent on hunting me down?

I have no idea. They never tell me.

I did try keeping an anonymous blog once. Didn't last: I couldn't be bothered to be inventive enough about changing details and fiddling dates & the like to be sure that somebody I knew wouldn't come across the blog by accident and think "Hey, I know who wrote this - and look what the git said about me!"

But there are quite a few anonymous bloggers. And it's not hard to be a completely untraceable blogger: Use tor to make your web browser traffic untraceable, then register for a blog at a free site such as blogger.com - hey presto, you have a blog that nobody can identify the author of.

Of course, it gets more difficult when that blog becomes popular, and the author decides to publish a collection of posts in book form. If you're up on the blogging community news, you'll probably have heard about the latest example of this.

I actually only encountered the "Girl With A One-Track Mind" blog a few weeks ago, linked from little.red.boat - it's certainly not office-safe, before you go looking for it yourselves. It's a woman's online sex diary.

Forgot all about it until last week, when Girl's book was published. Unlike, say, Belle de Jour, Girl appears not to have mastered anonymity following a book release: A newspaper found out who she was, and promptly published her real name.

I confess, I don't know what their rationale was. I doubt that the revelation increased their sales much, if at all. And it's very likely destroyed any chance that the blog will continue to be written.

I confess, I find it hard to see it as anything other than the petty vindictiveness that's showing up more and more aimed at bloggers by the established media outlets.

You may have seen stories such as news bloggers ordered to reveal their sources because "they aren't proper journalists".

Bloggers such as myself are, of course, not really affected by such things. But the "serious" blogs are posing an immense threat to newspapers and even to radio & TV news broadcasts. I personally don't buy a newspaper & very rarely watch the TV at all. Nine times out of ten, when the news comes onto the radio, I change the channel: My radio is there for music, not news.

But most of my RSS feeds are for news blogs. Slashdot is a blog, I read many of its stories each day. When I want to know more about legal issues in the IT world, Groklaw is my first and most important resource. And so on.

Bloggers have no commercial interests: They don't need to publish profitable stories like news networks do. Bloggers take full advantage of the possibilities provided by the Internet: News broadcasters are trying to keep their established outlets relevant.

Bloggers have mastered using the Internet for disseminating news. News networks, like the entertainment industry, would really prefer it if the Internet went away and stopped rocking their boat.

So is it any surprise that a paper did something as pointless and unpleasant as take away a blogger's anonymity, for no reason other than "because they can"?

Can you imagine the furore it would have caused had that paper chosen to reveal another newspaper's anoymous source? The public and the other news networks would have been baying for blood.

Bloggers are, essentially, their own source: An anonymous blogger should, IMO, be accorded the same right to anonymity as as anonymous source for any other news source.

But some established news sources appear to disagree. "The people have a right to know" is an ever-popular line that gets trotted out in such situations.

In my view, this is a principle that has been perverted. There is no distinguishing between what people have a RIGHT to know and what they just have a DESIRE to know. That's a large part of the reason I avoid the news a lot these days: It almost invariably irritates me immensely.

I don't think that people have a right to know that some celebrity or other got drunk on a night out. I don't think people have a right to see photos of a celebrity that were taken without their knowledge and published against their wishes.

I do think that people have a right to expect that the news should present them with the plain, unbiased truth, and not take quotes out of context because it makes them more sensational; or present facts in a way that makes them seem to show something that they don't.

I think it's high time that the media was hit with some restrictions. Undoubtedly they'll scream "Censorship" and try to play the "A free press is vital" card.

But a press shouldn't be free enough that it can publish a lie, and a misrepresented truth is, in my book, a lie. And every time I read the paper (Lou buys one most weekends for the TV listings) I feel like I'm playing a game of "Spot the facts" - and when it's a report on something I know a lot about, I'm all-too-frequently disgusted at the outright falsification and sensationalism that the papers get away with.

For instance, a recent incident at one of this country's most well-known scuba diving training centers - Stoney Cove.

Read CDNN's article about "Killer Cove" and you'll be told about a lake that kills almost one person a year, with the implication that it's a hideously dangerous place that should be shut down immediately.

Ask any diver in this country if Stoney Cove is a danger to the public, and he'll laugh in your face. They get over a thousand divers a week at that site, and in excess of sixty thousand divers do multiple dives on every vist each year.

One chance in about two hundred thousand of dying make a place dangerous? Let's hope these clowns never find out what the odds are of getting killed whilst driving: They'd start a national campaign to outlaw roads.

The facts as they present them are true. But there is no useful context supplied and the facts are heavily biased to give the read a completely untrue, more sensational, view of the situation. Regardless of the fact that there's nothing untrue in the article, it is an outright deception: The article itself is a lie.

And such articles are the norm: The facts are accurate but misrepresented. Whilst telling the truth at all times, the media is lying to us. And a media that is free to lie is as worthless as a media that is not free to tell the truth.

The press seems unwilling to restrict itself to the true and the relevant, preferring to give us the sensational-but-untrue and desireable-but-irrelevant because there's more money in it. No wonder they have such distaste for the non-profit blogging community.

Call it censorship if you like - I know for sure that the press will. But if they can't tell the truth, they should damn well be stopped from telling lies.