I posted a bug report to KDE today, feeling good that I was doing my civic duty. Later, I realized that I had posted it under my real name. I’ve been using the online persona “Robot Two” for around 6 or 7 years for everything from forum postings to blogging to distributing software. It seems from looking around at friends’ web sites that using an alias is pretty much the norm. It seems that most people are afraid to have their real identities revealed. Sometimes I agree with them. Also, there is an aspect that you can post messages with much more force or from a different angle than you would under your own name, which can lead to a different online personality. Some people take this to the extreme.

However, I’ve also done some things which I am proud of under my own “real world” name. For example, I’ve been published in Byte Magazine, contributed enough code the the Linux Kernel to be mentioned in it by name, and wrote some Quake 2 Mod tutorials.

Recently, I’ve been speaking about my background to various people, and I’m not sure that everything wouldn’t be simpler if I just had everything google back to my own name. Well, if you follow the links above, you’ll find they are published under my name. I’ll still be posting here as “Robot Two,” but I don’t think I’m going to go out of my way to remove personal identification.

BTW, there are other matches which show up when you google me. Generally, if it’s not linked off of 2robots.com, or if it’s not about computers in some way, its probably not me. On the other hand, I’ve found that “Robot Two” is pretty unique as a persona, but comes up with too many matches to make google useful :)