Preserving the Rainforest of Free Speech

The Internet is the last true realm of free speech (don’t worry this will get into author name changing and concealing, but this is an important introduction).  That’s marvelous.  That’s more than marvelous.  I, or someone more savvy, could write tomes about how invaluably important that is to preserve.  The internet is, thus, the “rainforest of free speech” in risk of the “deforestation of IP control”.  Okay, the metaphor is getting elaborate, but you get the picture: you can and must be able to speak your mind in of all places on the Net!  That said, however, sometimes some people want to keep their handles, usernames, pseudynms, or author names distinct and separate.  That’s fine and dandy.  There’s a couple of ways to accomplish this in wordpress, the best blogging platform (other than hand-coding your own site) ever.

It’s Safer To Have Separate Accounts

Afer scouring forums of people who have done multiple pseudonyms or nicknames, it became clear that the most certain way ensuring anonymity or distinct crisp no-relationship between two or more nicknames is to use two totally different accounts.

Sulz from a wordpress forum writes:

sulz
edit your profile (click your username next to the log out link), then put the nickname you wish to use. take note that people may be able to relate the two blogs to each other through your profile. to keep them entirely separate, it’s best to have two accounts.

And then deltafoxtrot confirms:

deltafoxtrot
I advise against maintaining different blogs under the same user account when they are not meant to show a connection.
The Author archives always have your WP.com-username in the URI. E.g.: each WP.com blog ‘Im involved with has my author archives accessible at:
http:// you get the idea .wordpress.com/author/deltafoxtrot/
This allows to positively identify someone’s involvement with a blog.

Conclusively, there are ways of editing your username via “nickname” under Profile, and while that works, there are often ways to associate nicknames with a primary account or other nicknames unless a separate account is used.   Security is important; freedom of speech is important, and publicizing (or not publicizing) your words how you want them is very important, and you can accomplish customizing how you want your words to look via profile adjustments or different accounts.  Thus, if you want to, in the words of a moderately acceptable band (but nowhere even in the vicinity of awesomeness as Beethoven or Mozart) Offspring, “keep ‘em seperated”, there are tricks and preferences you can adjust but the most certain way is simply separate accounts.