Low End Mac published
results of a survey about
What we hate on the web.
An interesting one was:
Articles with unidentified authors
729 votes (164/245/173/111/36). 22.5% don't care, 57.3% dislike it somewhat, and 20.2% hate it when a site doesn't identify its writers.
This interests me because one of my favorite lunchtime reads is
The Economist, which very very rarely identifies its writers. It doesn't bother me at all. At the same time, however, it is a rather solid and respectable magazine. In a sense, it's almost a big magazine blog. It has short articles, wide geographical and topical coverage, and is as timely as a printed weekly can be.
When it comes to blogs and other web sites, I haven't yet figured out when I care about the authors name and when I don't. In general, I trust The Economist. I think that anonymous correspondent reporting works out well for it, and I think it probably works out for similar styled web sites/blogs as well.