Blogs are a direct Web publishing tool that most any non-technical person can use to write and report online. What you do with this capability is just too vast to be categorized, judged and evaluated under one generic umbrella.

One use, often unpopular of blogs is the one made by whistleblowers, reporting on issues and stories that are not generally picked up by the traditional mainstream media.

Photo credit: Nara Vieira da Silva

But as blog-based whistleblowers get increasingly sacked by their own employers, it has become an important issue for many to find ways to keep one's own identity hidden when wanting to cover or report on sensitive issues online.

While it is my opinion that total transparency is the way that must be adopted to move beyond the highly filtered approach used by traditional media, I can give in to the fact that being aware of how to anonymize oneself can be at times something quite useful to know.

And if you are a blogger wanting to do just that, here is how to go about it:

How To Blog Anonymously

1) Invisiblog.com is a service that allows you to host a blog completely anonymous and for free. There are no strings attached and even the owners of the service do not have access to your identity.

2) If you fear though that someone could be logging the IP of the computer from where you are connecting to the anonymous blogging service, you can use the anonymous network Tor to hide your digital footprints and make your access to the blog not traceable back to your computer.

"Tor routes your Internet traffic through what's called an "overlay network" that hides your IP address. More importantly, Tor makes it difficult for snoops on the Internet to follow the path your data takes and trace it back to you."

3) Finally Anonymizer.com offers a very user-friendly tool called "Anonymous Surfing" and which routes all of your Internet traffic through an anonymizing proxy server. If you wish so Anonymous Surfing hides also your IP address from the services hosting your blog.

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Information extracted from:
How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else)
EFF
Published April 6, 2005

Other useful references:

How Tor works
http://tor.eff.org/overview.html

Anonymizer's Anonymous Surfing: http://www.anonymizer.com/anonymizer2005/1.5/