What do the following people have in common:

• Marston Alffred of SugarStats (online diabetics tool)
• Eric Metens of zeeDive (e-commerce)
• Otis Gospodnetic of Simpy (social bookmarking)
• Craig Fitzpatrick of devshop (software development project management)

As well as all being leaders of start up companies, they are four of eight who were interviewed by the same anonymous blogger.

On the Web, you can be anonymous, but if you stay anonymous can you get people to give you an interview? TechAddress (hosted at WordPress.com) seems to be able to.

2007-03-01 Update: Raincoaster shared the difference between anonymous and pseudonymous. If I wrote it know I would title it “Interview with an pseudonymous blogger?” Thinking in terms of pseudonymous, where there is actually an (established) identity changes the dynamics of the story for me.

Now that I am an Automattic employee, I am even more interested in the posts and blogs featured on WordPress.com’s front page. When a TechAddress article showed up on the front page of WordPress.com, I clicked to view the article like I do for all the articles. I was surprised by there being so few comments. Posts on the front page generally have a lot of comments.

I scanned some of the text and then went to the blog’s front page and scanned through the articles. I thought to myself, this blog is all over the start up map, and including a couple of press releases seemed tacky.

I went to TechAddress’ about page and read “TechAddress is a dedicated weblog for researching, exploring and announcing new Internet startup companies and technology while researching existing product advancements, VC investments, social networking and Web 2.0 news.” That’s great, but who are you?

I will present my findings on who I think is behind TechAddress in a later post partially based on my own discussion with the blog’s author, but first I wanted to find out what led these leaders to do an interview all with the same anonymous blogger.

In my year with Flock, a lot of journalists and bloggers came through the office. I have spoken to and corresponded with many journalists and bloggers. I have had the pleasure of hanging out with Michael Arrington many times.

I would find out what was the nature of the questions they wanted to know, do a quick Internet background check and then get them in contact with the best person on the Flock team. Most journalists and bloggers are explicit about who they are and who and what they represent.

Blog readership is largely based on personal trust.

Sometimes a blogger is just getting started and so I would just have to trust my instincts.

There is no information on the net about who writes for TechAddress, so I sent emails to the leaders interviewed to find out what led them to do the interview.

The four leaders listed above all make themselves accessible with contact information readily available on the web. I had difficulty finding contact information for Jahangir Shagaev or Elizabeth Tarbell, and my attempt to contact them went unanswered. The four responded to my questions often the same day or within a couple of days.

In their responses there were some common themes:

• TechAddress seems to another Web 2.0 news blog.
• The blog author who’s name is Tim seems like a nice, professional person.
• They had never heard of TechAddress nor Tim before.
• Previous articles were considered before accepting an interview.
• There are no ads on the blog.
• Help new news sites generate some content.
• Good publicity.
• Questions were straightforward and something they either already had a written answer for or could answer quickly.

Marston and Craig both commented that the initial email seemed canned and promised a readership of hundreds of thousands of people, but none of these leaders seemed to think there was anything out of the ordinary. But none of them recall any organization that Tim represents or seem to know anything else about him other than the articles online.
I think this is both a strange and fantastic reflection of the webbed world today.

Does the publication reflect on the person interviewed? SugarStats, Simpy, Craig and Marston‘s blogs, of course, all link to their interview, so does Studentface.

Who is Tim? Why would a web 2.0 blogger choose anonymity? Who are TechAddress’ hundreds of thousands of readers? What is TechAddress’ interest in these start ups and their products?

Would you give an interview?