In any online community, the issue of usernames is always a hot topic. Whoever runs the system has to decide at some point if a user is going to be referred to by his lastname, his lastname.firstname, his firstname.lastname, or initiallastname, or sevenand1, etc. Obviously, a convention has to be set so usernames become predictable and uniform.

Depending on the system, punctuation may or may not be welcome. Hyphens, periods, underscores, etc. could all muck up the functions of that particular software. Length could also be an issue. Early computers were obsessed with brevity; lastname and first initial (or seven letters of the last name, and the first initial) seemed to be a running trend for logging in to virtually any system.

Assuming you have no such limitations, however, what’s the best way?  The biggest complication with usernames (in my opinion) is avoiding duplicates. Bill Smith and Bob Smith are different people, and require different access, and email addresses, etc. so right off the bat, bsmith or smithb look like bad ideas. With the oh-so-popular 7 and 1 method, users don’t even have to have the same last name to create conflicts. Samantha Robertson would have the same username as Steve Roberts.

How do we think of people in the real world? I have a friend named Mike Johnson. Chris Bosh is a good basketball player. I like music by Johnny Cash. I have hundreds of examples I could list (turns out Facebook is good for something), but I sense a running theme: People generally go by their first and last name, in that order. Why do we feel the need to change that and make computers seem foreign and impersonal?

You’re just asking for confusion. Think of all the Smiths, Johnsons, and Williams(es)… you probably have a few of them in your organization. Some of them might even have the same initial. Why not send a note to Joe.Smith@yourcompany.com instead of guessing wrong with smithj@whatever.com and sending it to Jane instead? It’s easy to remember, you run less risk of duplicates, and it’s more personal than abbreviation.

Which is why you can reach me at Firstname.Lastname@left-button.com…

In this month’s Wired magazine, Paul Boutin published a short piece about the death of blogs, and the evolution of egomaniacal self promotion and online publishing. The Economist had a similar piece, simultaneously declaring that blogging was both dead and too mainstream. Clearly, blogging isn’t what it used to be, but issuing the Death Certificate is dangerously premature.

Both of these articles indicate that the gritty, independent appeal of early blogs has been replaced by something more “corporate” and for folks who embodied the spirit of alternative media, this might as well be death. While that may be a little harsh, many of the most popular blogs now belong to companies and organizations, often with many writers pumping out several posts a day. While most individuals can’t keep up with that pace, blogging still offers them the opportunity to publish what they want, when they want.

People still blog. People still read blogs. More and more these days, people are using blog sites to publish news stories and for generic content management. And the most popular blogs are still alternative media, just more popular and better-read than they once were. While the numbers are down, and the dynamic is shifting, blogging is still very much alive.

Did rock n’ roll die when the record companies embraced it? What about when punk music ended up on a car commercial? Is blogging too anti-establishment that it stopped being cool when “the man” got in on it?

Regardless of what these articles say, Twitter will not replace blogging. The 140-character limit on a user’s answer to “What are you doing right now?” is not a substitute for well crafted, opinionated prose (into which bloggers often embed video, audio, and images). Facebook offers a slightly better substitute, but only publishes your notes to the folks a) with Facebook accounts and b) with permission to see your profile. A legitimate blog has no such limitations, which is why there are still millions of fully public blogs updated frequently, and millions of readers clicking on them everyday.

That doesn’t sound like death to me.