Just got off the phone with a reporter from a newspaper in San Francisco. She was really cool so don’t take the narrative that follows indicative of my experience with her. I’ve left out her name and the publication name not because I want to skip her byline and crediting the source (ironic considering what follows) but because she didn’t say any of this out in the open that’s linkable. Once published, I do intend to send a link of this to her so she can show her editor though and maybe a dialog will continue in the comments and beyond. Maybe they will decide to use a quote from me, properly attributed in their story. The point is if I don’t make the case for why this is so important to me then who else will?

This isn’t the first time I’ve been interviewed for a piece in a traditional media nor was it anything new when concerns over using my correct author byline were raised. My response then and now? The New York Times linked to me as TDavid (free subscription required) and if it is a problem for any other media source out there then don’t use quotes from this publication or interviews from me.

Not trying to be a freak about it, but a byline is a byline. I’d expect every warm blooded writer out there to protect his/her byline. Writers already get crapped on enough that we should at least get credit for what we write (good, bad and indifferent). It’s a low paying position unless you are somebody like Stephen King or Danielle Steele and even if you are some super popular tech blogger like Robert Scoble, you still need to take on a day job to pay the bills. It’s so low paying a profession in fact that most writers need to take on additional work to supplement their passion.

But that’s just it, writers write because they have to. Not only, or even primarily for the money, but for the release. We write because we have a need to get the words out of our head and onto some canvas somewhere. To bear our collective souls.

For some bizarre reason some (many? all?) traditional media editors have this hangup with a blogger source being “anonymous” if it doesn’t come backed by a legal name. Can somebody please explain how any semi-skilled editor couldn’t figure out the difference between a truly anonymous source and one who is using a pen name? An anonymous source to me — as a reader — means somebody who specifically requested to be anonymous. Like Deep Throat.

I don’t want to be anonymous. I’m not requesting that now or ever in the past.

If I did, I surely wouldn’t have my picture on the homepage of this blog with my phone number and email address beneath it. I wouldn’t appear on video regularly or be hosting a live weekly web radio show with my voice unchanged for the last 7+ years. I certainly wouldn’t be attending public events, even speaking at a couple of them where cameras were feverishly snapping and videocameras were rollling. The horses are well out of the barn for me, I’m not anonymous. Can’t be, even if I wanted that now. As the old Def Leppard song says, it’s too late.

So I use a pen name. And pen names, for those who choose to do their research, are protected. You can insist that your pen name be used and that’s a non-negotiable part of any writing contract I’m signing these days. The fact that our company publishes this blog means I don’t have to negotiate to use my pen name here, I just do.

Using a pen name isn’t about protecting my privacy as most definitions of the phrase seem to describe and some people might believe. It’s not for me be in some sort of stealth mode to readers or avoid the blog paparazzi (lol, yeah, right). If you think about why somebody might want to logically use a pen name on the web, the nature of the web, it will make sense. Just ask Alice Cooper why he goes by Alice Cooper and not Vincent Furnier. Which is easier to remember and spell and sounds more rock and roll? Does that mean if Alice Cooper gives an interview that he’s any less credible or considered an anonymous source on rock and roll because he doesn’t want Vincent Furnier used by the newspaper?

Of course not.

I’ll provide a more relevant and realistic example in the blog world: Thomas Hawk. That’s not the guy’s real name and he says as much in his about page. He has his reasons, I’m sure, and they are probably different than mine but I respect his decision to use whatever name he wants on his blog. Whenever I link to or refer to him as I just did in a post, I use his correct byline. Davis Freeberg is another writer with a blog who knows Thomas Hawk and uses a pen name too. It kind of annoys me when I read stories that put blogger’s names in double quotes or go out of their way to point out that this is not their real name as if this somehow makes the blogger’s opinion any less worthwhile or credible.

Watch out now readers, this is a blogger not using his real name. Put away the candy, kiddies. Store the cookie jar in a fireproof safe. Bloggers with pen names can’t be trusted!

Seriously, it’s the literary equivalent of a slap across the writer’s face when nobody’s supposed to be looking. Head’s up guilty publications: we see right through it.

ID Vault revisited
Let’s get back to discussing what the reporter was interested in here at Hmm. I did a review last month for the program ID Vault. As readers know I write lots of reviews for lots of different products and services we buy and I intentionally write them from a personal standpoint.

I’m not some anonymous customer with an anonymous bank account. I’m a real consumer out there buying and writing about real products and services. My goal with a review is very simple: provide the company behind the product/service useful real world customer information. Sometimes I’m completely unable to use a product/service and my review becomes a statement of frustration. Other times I’m overwhelmed with joy about how great a product is and can’t wait to tell anybody and everybody. It’s interesting but not surprising that the positive reviews rarely get the exposure that the negative ones do.

This means I don’t sugercoat things that I think stink, nor avoid pumping up things I like. I tend to be very specific and include screenshots and descriptions of my experiences and hopefully that information combined with other customer reviews will help others make more informed decisions about products and services. We all know that advertisements don’t always tell the whole tale.

I fully expect this publication to outlive most of the products and services I’m reviewing and that’s already happening in a few cases. Just check out the Hmm reviews page and look for any review that has the text struck thru like this.

Disclaimer: In a small few cases I’ve written some paid reviews through the service ReviewMe, which start out the post in bold text saying it was a paid review so readers know exactly which ones these are. I do not get paid to say good or bad things about a product or review the product any differently than others I was not paid to write. Nor would I accept a penny from anybody to write a review slanted with any opinion other than my own. I have passed on reviewing several products and services that I wasn’t interested in and told others that wanted to send me products to review that I haven’t already purchased that I would either:

1) buy it myself and write a review
2) send back what they’ve sent me after the review (at their expense)
3) give it away to readers

In the case of ID Vault I wanted to like their product. Really, I know I gave it an F grade which isn’t inspiring, but I felt my reasoning was justified.

ID Vault was something I’d heard on the radio several times and my curiosity was piqued. My wallet isn’t terribly difficult to get into if a product fits a specific niche and isn’t that expensive. Our family spends a lot of money online and I’m very concerned about internet security. Does this mean I’m immune to having my identity stolen? Of course not. So you bet I’m looking for anything that will help make our financial transactions online more secure. I expected that since ID Vault was being endorsed by a well known figure in the security arena (Kevin Mitnick) who is trying to clean up his name the product would be more likely to better protect my security online. Expectation versus actual customer experience however — for me, just one customer — was quite different and off it went back to Best Buy to get my money back.

The reporter told me that she had the understanding that ID Vault would be made to work with Firefox in May and I tried it out in early June. I asked her if she had it working successfully in Firefox and she replied no. However, here we are over a month later and the ID Vault website still says it works with Firefox 2.0. Either my experience was completely flawed or they are still advertising something that is incorrect or some other explanation that remains a mystery to me (keep reading, the mystery is solved). If I were the reporter assigned this story, that’s one angle of the story I’d pursue.

(And I’d also work to convince my editor to knock off with the whole bloggers with pen names are treated like anonymous sources policy)

As I told the reporter: the best security solution with hardware would be something like the Paypal security key and not be browser dependent like ID Vault. Unfortunately that’s not going to happen unless each financial site releases a key and consumers online are not going to carry around a dozen different security keys. If so then the keychain of the future is going to look really bulky and break a lot of car ignitions.

There exists a Hmmcast video of me with ID Vault in hand talking about it. Listed are my reasons with links to why I was dissatisfied with the product. Since that review last month I haven’t heard one word from the company who made the product although there was a comment left by Mr. Mitnick’s rep that she would get word back to him about my review.

Note: just before publishing this post and after my interview with the reporter the
Vice President of Marketing Guard ID Systems, Inc. that makes the ID Vault Greg Marek stopped by in the comment section at 3:37pm PST to address the issues raised in my review.

I’ll follow up and try to get a dialog going there directly but this is curious timing. I don’t know if the reporter tipped Mr. Marek off or he just found the post, so my comments that follow in the next couple paragraphs are only meant if he was tipped off by the reporter and the timing wasn’t just coincidence and were written before I read Mr. Marek’s comments. I chose to keep them in this piece because the sentiment applies even if it’s not relative in this particular case. I’m sure the comments section will answer that if Mr. Marek will continue in a dialog with me. We’ll see.

This inaction and non-response is the most damning statement of all to me about the product. Not because they should be expected to answer every customer review on the web personally, but the fact they are spending the money advertising on the radio like crazy (I still hear these radio ads almost daily here, have you heard them?) and yet keep wondering why they don’t have anybody in PR who could contact me through this blog and explain why it doesn’t work with Firefox.

I’m sure somebody will point out that if I wanted an answer on this I could have contacted them directly and just asked before returning the product to the store. That would be a fair criticism in 1987 and maybe 1997, but definitely not 2007. These days companies need to have somebody running through the blogs and other online cross chatter looking for feedback. Take somebody like Sterling who responds to every blogger who uses his free Wordpress plugin and he’s a one man shop. If he can find time to do this for something free, then why can’t the company behind ID Vault do the same for their commercial product?

Some genius telling them to spend money on radio but not follow up with customers who actually purchased the product because of the radio ads?

The feedback that companies with products and services with concerns most need to hear is often the feedback they listen to the least. Where are these customers supposed to turn to? The internet is a great place through review sites like Epinions or posting it on their personal blogs. It’s good to see that some reporters are turning up these customer reactions and trying to interview them. It’s unfortunate however that old media is still treating these customers with blogs who use pen names like anonymous sources or avoid using them altogether because their editors balk over some ancient “must use legal name” policy.

The reporter for the newspaper emailed me at 1:45pm today. I was talking to her on the phone listed on this very website within an hour. Does this sound like an anonymous source to you? If the article quotes me as it should (TDavid) and people Google that name they will get a lot more results about who I am, what I do and what I’ve done compared to Googling my legal name. If the idea is to make me less anonymous the logical choice is to use the byline just as the logical choice would be for Alice Cooper to use Alice instead of Vincent.

(BTW, my head hasn’t exploded, I’m in no way suggesting I’m even in the same stratosphere as Alice Cooper, I’m just using him as an example of somebody who is quoted in newspapers and media without using his legal name. There are a lot of people, especially writers, who use pen names. This isn’t meant to be about popularity it’s about traditional media respecting and acknowledging an author’s pen name whether or not it is the same as his/her real name)

Stick by your brand
Just as writers should be quoted with their pen names and actors and artists as their stage names, not their legal names, so should bloggers. And if a blogger has a particularly offensive name, then the publication always has the option of quoting the publication name (unless that’s offensive too, I suppose) instead of the author. This blog is still an entity, yes/no? Can we at least agree this blog is not anonymous?

If/when other bloggers reading are contacted by newspapers or other traditional media (TV, radio,. etc) — and it will happen as more and more traditional media continue to realize that reliable, credible sources sometimes can, in fact, be bloggers — I’d suggest not giving them permission to use a different name than the name you write under. If that means you get cut out of the story or they pursue the interview with some other blogger who is willing to let them credit a different byline, be ready to stand your ground. Yeah, you won’t get some juice if it’s an online piece, but what’s more important? Link juice or protecting your byline? I’ll take the latter, thank you very much.

I realize some bloggers out there claim it’s imperative to use your legal name to blog, that it does increase your credibility and exposure. Surprise, surprise, that’s BS. You don’t need to use your legal name unless you’re filling out legal paperwork. Last time I checked writing a blog post wasn’t a binding legal document. Nor was being quoted in a newspaper article, on a radio show or on television. The list of people we know by other names than their legal names in publications and Hollywood is staggering.

After writing this, I see Kent Newsome writing about citizen journalism. He is pointing to me as one of many citizen journalists. I believe Kent is blogging under his real name and there’s nothing wrong with that at all. More power to him and others who choose to do that, but I’m curious: does using a pen name make my words any less credible as a citizen journalist, Kent? If you and I write about the same thing, should your opinion be more credible than mine simply because you are using your legal name (I think) and I’m not?

Readers, what do you think?

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