Alan’s Blog

Education ICT – An IT Professional’s Perspective

Genghis Khan is Alive and Well! Or Posting Anonymously to Blogs

October 27th, 2006 · 746 Comments
Opinion




This particular post has been prompted by the following comment posted on my blog by someone calling themselves ‘A Slacker’ (Read it here). They are unhappy at what they feel is censorship in another blog also accessed under the auspices of the Exc-el.org portal run by our Education division.

I don’t really want to go into the rights and wrongs of blog owners deleting comments posted against their entries other than to give my opinion. If you allow people to comment on your posts (as Exc-el.org encourages its contributors to do) then unless the posting is rude, offensive, derogatory or way off topic then I don’t think it should be deleted.
 
What I really want to comment on though is the idea of the post being deleted because it came from an anonymous contributor. This seems to me to be an utterly ludicrous argument as from what I have seen  (and please feel free to correct me here as I might be missing something very obvious) anyone can post comments to my blog and claim to be anyone they want to be. I assume this holds true for other peoples blogs as well.
 
To post a comment on my blog all you need do is supply a name, an email address and hey presto you are suddenly Genghis Khan contributing your views on all matters ICT in East Lothian Schools. I’m not even sure old Genghis actually needs a valid email address but given how easy it would be for him to get one anyway this is a bit of an irrelevance.
 
Now whether Genghis would actually be able to contribute meaningfully to any ICT debate is in itself debatable but I’m sure he would have had an interesting slant on allowing teachers to install software.
 
My point is why should Genghis’ contribution be deleted just because I don’t know who he is. As my blog is available to the World via the Internet the reality is that many of the people reading my blog won’t know who the contributors actually are either (no matter whether they use an alias or even their real name)– does this make their contribution any less valid?
 
I choose to use Alan C as I’m too boring to think up something more original but think how interesting things could get (in our community at least) if I chose to use something like Alan Blackie or R Jones!
 

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