AI agents might be able to identity anonymous online writers

Showing all posts about blogs

AI agents might be able to identity anonymous online writers

12 May 2026

American journalist Kelsey Piper, writing at The Argument:

But soon, the entire debate over internet anonymity will be as anachronistic as an iPod Touch. That’s because Claude Opus 4.7 is here, and last week, I discovered it could identify me from text I had never published, text from when I was in high school, text from genres I have never publicly written in. And if it can identify me, soon, it will be able to identify many of you.

There’s quite a cohort of people — including bloggers — writing anonymously online. Possibly though, those most at risk of being identified might be people who have a reasonable amount of publicly accessible work that is in their actual name. For instance, someone who writes for a news outlet or magazine in their own name, but blogs anonymously.

Mind you, the rate at which AI technologies are developing means agents will likely only get better at determining a writer’s identity, working with hardly any information.

How many friends, family, co-workers, know about your blog/website?

2 May 2026

Half the web might know about your blog, but how many of your in-person acquaintances, people in your household, community, or workplace, know you blog?

Do you even tell them? Do you want to?

The question came up at Forking Mad this week, and started me thinking. When I uploaded the first version of disassociated in 1997, I told just about everyone I knew. At that point I aspired to be a web designer, so telling the whole world of my online presence made perfect sense. I ended up working in the industry for a few years, with a role coming about after a design studio in Sydney spotted my website, and contacted me.

Over time though disassociated became more blog than personal website/design portfolio. Having said that, I just about never posted screenshots or links to the work I did commercially, I was happy to let quirky old disassociated do the talking. But after a stint in web design, I decided it wasn’t for me. Somehow, building commercial websites just wasn’t as fun, or satisfying, as the personal work.

That’s when I started doing more writing. In 2007, after years of running this website with static HTML files, I migrated to WordPress (WP) — where, for better or worse — I remain. As a web publishing platform, WP works for me, does what I need, and that’s fine for me for now. I moved to a web publishing platform partly because I wanted to have a go at earning money as a blogger.

And in 2007 I wasn’t alone.

That ambition was achieved, though not quite in the way I envisaged, a story for another time maybe. But somehow moving to a web publishing platform brought disassociated into the limelight, even if I was an actor to the side, the far side, of the stage. Visits skyrocketed, and my in-box was full of messages from people interested to some degree in what I was doing.

At that time also I resided full-time in Sydney, and was often out and about meeting people. I would drag introvert me out to networking events, art show openings, and film screenings.

I had business cards featuring my URL, and handed them out indiscriminately. I most certainly told people about my website then, including family and friends. Once, more as fun, I made up, and printed out, flyers with my URL on tear-tabs, and posted them on noticeboards on the campus of a Sydney university. I wasn’t relying solely on online methods of blog promotion.

But blogging was an all encompassing passion and experience, and, back in those heady days, so much more than merely writing a few blog posts. The picture in 2026, however, couldn’t be any different. Blogs were pushed aside by social media, and the party was over. Actually, strike that. The party isn’t over, it’s just a lot smaller than it was before.

More to the point though, blogs are no longer the talking point they once were. Outside of Indie/SmallWeb circles at least.

When I talk to people I meet in-person and discussion turns to online presences, they expect me to share my social media handles. A blog, or personal website, sounds positively quaint. To the point I sometimes feel awkward even mentioning it. On the few occasions I might say, tell the barista at the cafe that I blog, I end up changing the subject, when I realise their eyes have glazed over.

It’s too bad, because the question has me yearning to supplement my part-time day job by reprising my role as CEO of the disassociated online one-person in-my-dreams publishing behemoth. Even if it is a website/blog, not a social media page. But if you have a website you want the world to know about, spreading the word to more of the people you know in-person is the go I think.

Friction-maxxing, a buzzword to restore balance to your life force

24 April 2026

Canadian author and researcher Kathryn Jezer-Morton documented friction-maxxing in an article (paywalled) for The Cut, in January this year. Weeks later, a Wikipedia page was published about the phenomenon. Is that, then, why friction-maxxing is now referred to as a cultural trend?

For the uninitiated, Wikipedia defines friction-maxxing thusly:

Friction-maxxing is the practice of intentionally choosing less convenient options in daily life to build tolerance for discomfort, resist technology-driven ease, and preserve what proponents describe as meaningful human experiences.

I’ve been seeing references to plain old friction, chiefly across the blogosphere, well before January though. Bloggers using the term in their writing were suggesting there ideally/always needed to be a certain difficulty in what we do, whatever that is. This because we’ve somehow come to expect everything we do to be simple and effortless.

I probably live relatively straightforwardly. I work, then I don’t work. I don’t run marathons, climb mountains, or cross oceans in a sail boat. It seems to me if you want more friction in your life, those sorts of activities make a good start. Friction-maxxing, on the other hand, suggests relying less on automated and algorithm-powered goods and services. And AI.

Instead of ordering food delivery, you should prepare the meal yourself. Rather than dictate notes, or type into a notes apps, you should hand write them on paper. Instead of setting up meetings on video calls, you should arrange a face-to-face gathering. Instead of texting or emailing, you should call, and speak to someone, or meet in person. Frightening, no?

For my part, maybe I should, for instance, see movies at the cinema, not stream them in the frictionless comfort of our home. I’ll let you know how that goes.

The big tech companies and social media platforms tell us “boredom, social awkwardness, and effortful thinking”, among other things, are problems to be eliminated. And now that they have been, so we’re told, friction-maxxing is required to make life trickier again. To restore the balance.

Talking of social media though, to instantly increase friction, reduce, or dispense with social media, set up a personal website, and start blogging. That’ll be a source of friction for months.

But in a world where public transport doesn’t run to timetable, traffic gets gridlocked, computers freeze, websites fail to load, phones find themselves in an area with no reception, the coffee grinder at the cafe breaks just as you arrive, you’re caught out by off-app, non-forecast rain in an open, unsheltered space, who needs to be creating friction?

But none of this is really friction, it’s simply life. Annoyances we must deal with. But it keeps us on our toes, and alive. I’m not then convinced by this… cultural trend.

It seems to me embracing friction-maxxing is an attempt to conceal some other, possibly deeper malady. It’s a smoke screen. A marketing term even. Friction-maxxing is akin to putting a band-aid, not on a small cut or scratch, but something far more serious. Something that likely requires proper diagnosis and treatment. If something’s wrong, distractions are not an ideal solution.

My website is ninety-two percent not ready for AI agents

20 April 2026

This is where we’re at now. Your website needs to be AI agent ready, or it presumably no longer makes the grade. I scored eight out one-hundred. Can I get a badge?

I’m not sure though disassociated is a website AI agents have any interest in anyway.

In any event, AI agent readiness is the new SEO. Since responses to search queries are AI summaries, your website likely no longer features in search engine results. And if it does, chances are no one will click through anyway. They’ll be content with the AI search summary.

But, you may be rewarded with a visitor or two, if an AI agent is able to use information you published, in response to a question (prompt) posed, provided the agent lists your website as a source. We should all be thanking our lucky stars.

I have all sorts of work to do, meanwhile, if I want my website to be AI agent ready. Work that I probably don’t have the time to do. For one, “support” here for Markdown is non-existent.

But, might a low AI agent ready score aid in keeping AI scrapers away? Somehow I doubt it. Even if a website is deemed “low quality” on account of its poor readiness score, I can’t see information hungry AI scrapers ignoring whatever content they can get their hands on.

The Indie Internet Index, another new directory of independent websites

8 April 2026

Hot on the heels of Monday’s link to indie/independent blog post aggregator Blogosphere, comes the Indie Internet Index. The importance of these sorts of resources cannot be understated at a time when the independent, open web, is under increasing threat.

Blogosphere: an algorithm free blog post aggregator

6 April 2026

The new (to me at least) aggregator of blog posts aptly and cleverly titled Blogosphere, is the creation of engineer and writer Ramkarthik Krishnamurthy:

But it’s really about something bigger: rebuilding a thriving community of independent writers and thinkers who share their thoughts freely, without waiting for an algorithm to decide who gets to see them.

A list of recent blog posts can also be viewed in a more simple text style format. In addition, both listings of posts have their own RSS feeds.

Blogosphere joins other fine IndieWeb/SmallWeb blog post aggregators including Blogs Are Back, Blogroll Club, Blogroll, Feedle, powRSS, Oceania Web Atlas, and ooh.directory, to name but a few.

Twitter, the upstart social media platform that stunted the growth, and more, of the web

24 March 2026

Dave Winer:

A bit of history. Read this post from 20 years ago by Phil Jones. That’s what I was trying to do back then, just as Twitter came online. I didn’t know it then but was the moment when the web stopped growing.

I don’t think, in 2006, anyone realised, nor could have realised, the profound impact Twitter, as one of the earliest social media platforms, was going to have, specifically on blogs and websites, and more generally, and later, the web.

Twitter launched smack bang in the middle of a period often referred to as the golden age of blogging, a time when websites and blogs seemed invincible and invulnerable. Believe it or not, they were the only game in town.

If anything was going to change the status quo, it wasn’t going to be some upstart microblogging platform where people said too much about their private lives, and what they had for lunch.

How wrong we were. But who was to know, back then, how influential and powerful the social media platforms would become, and potential threat they posed to the free flow of news and information.

It is possible to escape this quagmire by creating, collaboratively, a social media platform, impervious to the grips of monopoly control, and tech-billionaires? I thought we already had, in the form of Mastodon and Bluesky, but no one can agree which is the right model.

Is there a third way of some sort? And if so, will this option gain sufficient traction, nullify the platforms we want nullified, or remain a niche offering, like the alternatives presently available?

When it comes to social media platforms twenty years after Twitter arrived, it seems like we only go in circles. Ever decreasing circles.

Font Awesome cans renaming plans for Eleventy static site generator

17 March 2026

Proposals were afoot to rename Eleventy — often styled 11ty — a blog publishing platform favoured by some Indie/Small Web bloggers, as Build Awesome.

The awesome part of 11ty’s would-be new name derives from Font Awesome, producers of a wide range of icons website publishers can make use of. I’ve used their icons in the past, in place of the text menu items presently in the animated colour bar above the title of this post.

11ty was acquired by Font Awesome in September 2024.

To accompany the renaming, a Kickstarter campaign was, from what I can tell, launched to fund development of a more commercial “website builder” version of 11ty, while the original blog publishing platform would remain free to use.

But both the fund raiser, and renaming plans, have been paused after Font Awesome claimed only a handful of emails promoting the Kickstarter campaign had reached intended recipients.

A backlash by 11ty publishers against the renaming proposal however seems the more likely reason.

Even though 11ty creator Zach Leatherman joined Font Awesome at the time of the acquisition, the company appears to have completely misunderstood the veneration in which the blogging platform, as 11ty, is held by publishers. Why even consider changing the name of such a highly regarded product in the first place, and worse still contemplate something like Build Awesome?

Get listed in the 2026 Internet Phone Book

14 March 2026

The second edition of the Internet Phone Book is in the works, and publishers of personal websites are being invited to submit their URL.

I was stoked to be included in the inaugural edition, compiled last year by Kristoffer Tjalve and Elliott Cost, and you can still call me on 492.

RELATED CONTENT

blogs, books, publishing

New AI tool intends to streamline using WordPress.com blogs

25 February 2026

The new tool will look after some aspects of the design and maintenance of a WordPress.com blog.

As I understand it, the AI assistant will not write content, though it can “edit and refine” posts if asked. The assistant however can create custom images upon prompt. Anything you like — within reason — by the sounds of things.

Many of the bloggers I read dislike using AI in their actual writing, but may make limited use of the technology for research, or, say, for editing their work. I don’t do that myself (though maybe I should for editing, fixing typos, etc.), but think that’s a choice for the individual to make.

I see an upside to the new WordPress.com feature though. An AI assistant might encourage a few more people to take up blogging, given it takes care of what is considered by some to be the more technical parts of the process.

Editing the appearance of a theme, for example, which some people probably find daunting. The assistant won’t quite put WordPress.com blogs on an equal footing with social media platforms, in terms of ease of use, but it might be seen as step in the right direction.

So long as the AI assistant limits its activities to design and maintenance functions, and does not expand into composing posts, all should be well…

« older posts