Belle de Jour
Because it seems to be fashionable to declare your opinion one way or the other on this one, I Have A Theory™ about who Belle de Jour is.
Well, not really a theory, more a “I wouldn’t be surprised if that who it was”-type feeling.
I reckon BdJ is actually Anna. I have no real evidence for this other than:
- They both live in London
- I think Anna moved to London about the same time BdJ started
- Anna hasn’t been posting much lately - too busy writing a book? ;)
- Both clearly well-read - I can imagine Anna reading Private Eye (BdJ did a spoof E. J. Thribbs poem)
- Both not exactly technical - Belle struggled with an RSS feed, Anna has never had one on her site
- Something about the writing style rings a bell.
- Both excellent, excellent writers (and if it’s not you, Anna, you can take it as a compliment that your writing is as good as Belle’s…)
So there you go, that’s what I reckon.
Whilst considering this, I came up with another strategy to “out” Belle. I’m fairly convinced that whoever is Belle already has another blog - probably well-known to those in the UK blogging scene. So maybe some correlation could be done between posting times of Belle and other UK bloggers? Take some standard deviations of the differences in posting times and see what comes up? This relies on Belle and the other weblog being posted to one after the other… Possibly a good metric, possibly not. You could get some pretty graphs out of it and see which lines look suspiciously similar…