I want to know about screen names. We get to create a persona for ourselves, label (brand?) ourselves a certain way. What prompts us to make the choices we do? How do we see ourselves, or perhaps more importantly, how do we want others to see us?
I use afhill for nearly everything online. It wasn’t anything I even picked: my first email account was assigned - afhill@ualberta.ca. Generally email accounts for students were “first initial-last name”, but ahill was taken. I didn’t mind, because my mother’s first initial was also A, so within my family, we’d always left notes for AFH for me or AMH for my mom. I’m comfortable with my middle initial 
Now virtually all my online accounts are afhill:
- this blog (http://www.afhill.com/blog)
- Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/afhill)
- Digg (http://digg.com/users/afhill)
- Old Dmoz Editor profile (http://www.dmoz.org/profiles/afhill.html)
- Friendfeed (http://friendfeed.com/afhill)
- LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/in/afhill)
- Shelfari (http://www.shelfari.com/afhill)
- Technorati (http://technorati.com/people/technorati/afhill)
- Tumblr (http://afhill.tumblr.com)
- Twitter (http://twitter.com/afhill)
- Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/user/afhill77)
*Not sure what happened with youtube, had to add “77″ at the end 
So yes, I’m quite consistent with my online presence. But I know many people use a host of different screen names. I’d love to find out why and how you determine the name to use. Are they different personas that you tie together under a specific name (i.e. when using “CookieMonster” on recipe sites, but “PixelPrincess” on design sites) or is it based on whim?
I’d really appreciate any and all thoughts on the matter…!
I’d say I do it in tiers of anonymity: I have my public handle, my private handle, and my anonymous handle. The public one is used for branding purposes: krotscheck (Go figure, right?). The private one is for banking establishments and other official sites, and the anonymous one is used for service ‘tasting’ and exploration of places I have little intent of ever coming back to.
For the longest time I went with something that was not directly related to me. I’d have different handles for different sites and they would vary with how anonymous I wanted to stay. With the explosion of social sites, I’ve moved to using the same handle (a variation on my name) on most sites. I’m finding this is more beneficial in terms of reputation and find-ability.
Ha…can’t come up with a screen name??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????