If you read someone's blog

[bakedpotato]

is your ID automatically revealed to the blogger?

if the blogger has decent site stats they may well be able to see all IPs that have visited their site. In some cases this will be enough to identify you. Not sure what you mean by ID though.

highly unlikely that anyone can identify you from your IP address unless they work for the phone company, so no.

On another thread someone has posted about being able to identify people who looked at her blog...

what does IP stand for?

IP is the number assigned to your machine, or more properly, your connection to the internet. Some ppl have static IPs which are renamed to something they've chosen (many ppl using plusnet have this) and as such they are identifiable in that you can then look up the owner.

If you have a blog and have a comments facility on it, it will often record the IP address along with the comments, so you can identify your commenters but not your anonymous readers.

Jax

What is a blog & how do you find peoples blogs, always been interested in all this but never asked, so anyone care to explain more?

hardly anyone has a static ip with a proper reverse lookup though onlinemum. sometimes you can lookup the company from an IP, but that will just tell you the company the person works for, not the person. in general you can't identify people who look at your blog unless they identify themselves.

scooby: see blogger.com. a blog is a mini-updateable website ( or "web log" -> "blog". those techies are such linguistic geniuses) on which anyone can spout forth. Cool for people who want to keep a diary which anyone can read, but in general seriously over-rated other than as a good way for Journalists to fill some column inches without doing any proper research.

sue - but that's my point. the blogger would have to have known you were staying in that hotel to know who you are. and even then most hotels don't have proper reverse lookup so the blogger wouldn't know anyway.