Anonymous coward

I caught sight of this at the Globe and Mail site — the words “anonymous coward” in the header after I logged in — and it made me laugh. This is a term I stole from Slashdot when I was helping to design the Globe’s social strategy back in 2008 or so. My idea was that there would be a kind of tier system for users who joined the Globe, so they could “level up” the way one does in video games, by providing more information about themselves so that we could create a kind of social network. One of the perks of being a member was that you could use your real name. Until then, you were an “anonymous coward” 🙂