Good magazine has a post entitled The Eternal Shame of Your First Online Handle, in which people share how they selected their first internet pseudonym. In the last few years, more and more people are using their real names online instead of anonymous identifiers.
Here at Neatorama, every author either uses their real name or a made up name that sounds like a real name so they don't have to explain it (except for me, which means I am a dinosaur in internet terms). However, the majority of our commenters use pseudonyms. Would you like to share with us the story of how you selected it -or the story of some abandoned name you once used? Link -via Metafilter
Those of us who came of age alongside AOL must contend with something even more incriminating than a lifelong Google profile: A trail of discarded online aliases, each a distillation of how we viewed ourselves and our place in the world at the time of sign-on. The dawn of the Internet was an open invitation to free ourselves from the names our parents gave us and forge self-made identities divorced from our reputations IRL.
Here at Neatorama, every author either uses their real name or a made up name that sounds like a real name so they don't have to explain it (except for me, which means I am a dinosaur in internet terms). However, the majority of our commenters use pseudonyms. Would you like to share with us the story of how you selected it -or the story of some abandoned name you once used? Link -via Metafilter
Back in the day when we migrated from Fidonet and BBS'es to the internet (which mainly was Usenet at the time) I needed a nick that wouldn't give away my being a girl right away to all the single nerds online. Still my #1 identity. I have other aliases as well - I use my real name for work only. It's so uncommon every single hit in Google is me.