TPH at Math Class for Poets has some piercing observations about anonymity in the blawg world.

I must admit that there is a definite psychological benefit to identifying one's self with one's own writing and there have been a few times in the past couple months where I wanted to say, "Hey! I wrote that!" I can't tell you if the quality or content of my writing would be measurably different had I chosen to attach my name to it, but I can say I feel remarkably free to write about whatever I choose. My choice of a pseudonym was motivated in part by internet privacy concerns and, yes, motivated in part by concerns about my future career.

Yet, I don't feel any psychological dissociation as a result of my pseudonymity. As far as I'm concerned, I'm me! I don't make any mental shifts when I sit down to write. I've really just set out to articulate my thoughts, collect them, observe the shifts in my thinking, and rant and rail along the way (because it's fun!). Of course I've refrained from writing or commenting on a few topics that might give me away, or framed them differently than I might have writing under my own name.

Whether pseudonymously or not, most bloggers (especially those with professional careers to think about) are going to filter one way or another. This just happens to be the mode I've selected. It doesn't mean I've completely foreclosed the possibility of staking claim to my writing here (I suppose a psychologist might say that's a need to reintegrate my fragmented conciousness or whatever), but at this point, I didn't think was appropriate or necessary for me to plaster my name all about. Nor did I think it was necessary as a contextual matter. For the most part, law students' experiences are largely similar; it makes it extraordinarily simple to comment on life in law school and the transition to professional.