Anonymous bloggers have to be careful. Really, really careful. In order to ensure that they maintain their anonymity, they need to change names, places, and circumstances; they need to keep their e-mail address a secret, or set up an alternative one; they need to make sure they don’t tell anyone who they are… it’s all quite a faff. And, if they become famous off the back of their blogs, people will start putting a lot more work into finding out who they are.

Examples of bloggers whose real identities have been ferreted out one way or another are numerous. There’s Dooce, Petite Anglaise, Girl with a One Track Mind, Fake Steve Jobs, Jessica Carr … and, this week, possibly Violent Acres. Whether her real identity has actually been uncovered or not isn’t entirely clear, but that hasn’t stopped various blogs writing gleeful, spite-filled rants about her, and plotting to visit her house to take pictures of her. Most of the bloggers whose identities were found out lost their jobs, and who knows what havok their ‘coming out’ caused to their personal lives…

But isn’t there an upside?

I mean, look at the number of newspaper and television interviews the Girl with a One Track Mind has done since her identity was revealed. She’s a fairly regular contributor to The Guardian, now, and all the extra publicity surrounding her unmasking can’t have hurt her book sales. Several other bloggers who’ve lost their jobs and been involved in all sorts of controversy after their Internet anonymity was ripped away have come away with book deals - and most of them have adverts on their blogs in order to generate revenue, so, again, the extra publicity can’t have hurt…

The only big name anonymous blogger still out there now is Belle Du Jour. She’s got several books out and, currently, a fairly contentious series based on her books starring Billie Piper. If someone found out who she was, would that help her ratings, or harm them?

Then, I suppose, there’s always the issue of whether any amount of money is worth the hassle of becoming unexpectedly infamous. But losing one’s much cherished anonymity online (as well as being practically inevitable these days) might not be all bad.