And it's not the Hotmail or Yahoo ones. It's my work one, which I had to present ID to get.

Tell him you think he's a fake.

If I had one from his outfit, I would write to that one and ask whether he's the guy with the blog, but to write to the anonymous email posted at the blog to get independent confirmation would be stupid.

You've heard the one about the patient that told the doctor he wanted a second opinion, and so the doctor told him twice? Kind of like that.

For that matter, what evidence does someone new to this board have that you're not a fifty-year-old guy working in a gas station?

Exactly. I'm glad you get my point.

I've got a picture and a bio here, and I post under my full name. Not wise, maybe, but my cards are on the table. Half the people here could be fakes. Who would know?

Yes. The personae are real. The people behind them may be. Or maybe not.

Some of them I'm more certain of than others.

Or is what they say more important?

It depends. If more credence is being given to someone because of his or her alleged inside knowledge (see the rest of your response, below), then no. If anonymity allows people to get away with deliberate falsehoods or sloppy reporting because there is no one to hold them accountable, then no.

There is a segment at this site that states that I am a professional librarian, as part of the discussion on copyright. My vital statistics are not supplied, but Robert has information enough for him to have confidence that I was telling the truth about myself. I also provided other, verifiable information, in the form of links to more official sites than my brain, to support what I said.

Many, many bloggers have absolutely no backup at all, only their own opinions. Which, as I have said elsewhere, are excellent sources on their own opinions. Their opinions are not inherently factually dependable on any other subject except what's going on between their own ears. The same can be said of your opinions, and of mine.

You're being deliberately thick, which from someone like you is like fingernails on a blackboard.

I'm being stubborn, which is my nature, but I'll take the backhanded compliment to my intelligence. Thank you.

Jason Van Steenwyk is with the First Battalion, 124th Infantry Regiment of the Florida National Guard, deployed to Iraq, and returning on March 17. He shows up in several news stories about the Guard, including this one. He was in the class of '88 at Kalaheo High School.

I read the article. No mention is made of a blog of any kind. He does talk about supervising the cook who is the focus of the article:

His company's executive officer, Lt. Jason Van Steenwyk, of Fort Lauderdale, said Bean is one of those soldiers he doesn't have to spend a lot of time supervising.

"He'll take the ball and run with it," Van Steenwyk said. "I don't have to worry about micro-managing. Every other unit has a large (dining facility) on their post. But for us it just wasn't cost effective, so these guys didn't have to do a lot of cooking since July."

From this, I can take that there is a Jason Van Steenwyk, of Fort Lauderdale, serving in the 1st Battalion, Florida National Guard, at Hurricane Point, battalion headquarters in Iraq, on the date when this article was written.

Notice the assignment editor who wrote the article has a bio linked to the article. This is confirmation of his identity.

If Lt. Van Steenwyk has a bio that is as innocuous as the one you posted, why doesn't he post it near his work?

You could do a hell of a lot worse than going through some of his older entries, and learning a thing or two about being deployed to Iraq and what it's really like to be in the military.

I could do a hell of a lot better going through the stories of people who have been deployed in Iraq who have also been interviewed by other people so I know that at least one other human being has confirmed that this is a real person who has really been there, and not someone pretending to be a real person who has really been there. Some of them have told their own stories, too. I could find out what it's really like to be in the military.

Some things are journalism. Some things are memoirs. To be credible, they need more documentation than just appearing.