with respect to why people/users generate content, it might be fun to look at how this topic was addressed in the pre-web2.0 and pre- ecommerce times. "cooking pot markets" for example was a concept explored by rishab ghosh which first appeared in 1996, in the years following many variations were reprinted and many conferences in europe picked up on the topic (the wizards of os conference (berlin) is one example where ghosh himself was a speaker). ghosh's own homepage provides the following listing of the article: Ghosh, Rishab Aiyer, 1998, Cooking-pot Markets: an economic model for the trade in free goods and services on the Internet, First Monday, vol 3, issue 3, translated into French and German and reproduced in multiple versions in several books, journals and other publications and with respect to anonymity: we have been informally discussing a similar topic, but from the perspective of those who design, research and develop anonymizers e.g., tor. we were asking the question if anonymity leads to less successful file sharing systems in comparison to file sharing systems with a identified participants, social network or community behind it (or maybe it is for other reasons that these systems do not pick up? but this could be one aspect). i believe though that this is a different concept of anonymity then what was meant by zeynep and others. if i would try to explain the difference from a technical point of view it would look likethis: when we say "anonymity", we are not referring to the use of pseudonyms (e.g., people using nick names) or the posting of contributions without an explicit logged in user under a pseudonym called "anonymous". rather, we are talking about certain tools which in addition to the use of such pseudonyms hide the ip address of the user/ source of information. now, it would be interesting to find out what for users count as anonymous? or, what was actually meant in the earlier contributions with anonymity? and, in any case, thank you for all the other references, very useful for the discussions we have been trying to have.... :) best, s. Disclaimer: http://www.kuleuven.be/cwis/email_disclaimer.htm