I’m working with a student right now on an essay that I think is really interesting, self-reflective and an important piece of writing for her.  It’s for my journalism class, which means it’ll get published in our school newspaper.
    I’m certainly no fan of anonymity, and think it should be used rarely, very, very rarely.  (Dan Rather agrees with me — and that’s cool.  Thanks, Andy, for the podcast!)  Sometimes, though, I think it makes sense for a student to post a piece anonymously if the piece might be one that could hurt the student in the future.
    In this case, the piece involves alcohol and I don’t want it to be attached to the student’s online identity ten years down the road.  I expect that this sort of writing will happen from time to time, and I need a way to properly look after those students.
    Since we’re using Drupal for the paper, every piece needs to be attributed to a particular author.  We’re going to create a new account for these anonymous pieces, and I’d like a clever pseudonym for the account, a name that says "we’ve chosen anonymity for a good reason."  We considered several historical pseudonyms:

• Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay used "Publius" in the Federalist Papers.  A little too weighty.
• Benjamin Franklin has used tons — Silence Dogood, Poor Richard, Polly Baker (which I kind of like, but I don’t think it quite fits)
• Here’s a good list that I still need to look through more thoroughly.  Maybe there’s something good in there.

    Got any ideas?  We’ll certainly include an editor’s note in the blog explaining why we’ve gone with anonymity and who the original user of the pseudonym is.