Keeping Belle de Jour’s secret

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posted Nov 16 @ 10:08 PM by Jason Kottke · gift link

Darren from LinkMachineGo, an old school blogger, guessed Belle de Jour’s identity soon after her blog started. How? Pre-Belle, Brooke Magnanti ran an obscure Robotwisdom-style link blog and wrote in a few other online forums and Darren recognized the writing style. Not only didn’t Darren tell Magnanti or anyone else, he even set up a clever Googlewhack honeypot to detect people searching for her secret identity and tipped Magnanti off that The Daily Mail was sniffing around.