A blogger known only as Darren has revealed how he guessed Belle de Jour’s identity years ago – 5 years ago in fact.
He kept Dr Brooke Magnanti secret and only contacted her once he knew two weeks ago through a Googlewack he created that The Daily Mail was closing in on her identity. He warned her, and she went to the Sunday Times with her story.

She was one of the first bloggers in Britain, and Darren knew most of them. He writes “I was in the very lucky position of having met many London bloggers at the time and probably briefly read a large percentage of the UK written blogs during 2000 and 2001. UK blogging was (and still is) full of young, smart people and anyone of them might have written Belle’s blog. I never believed that a professional writer could be BdJ – apparently effortless blog writing takes practice, and required an understanding of a new medium which not many people had at the time. So I asked myself: which blogger is it?”

Shortly after starting her new blog, Belle asked Darren to list her new blog. He said, “Sending the link to me implied somebody who knew quite a lot about how UK blogging worked at the time”.

It was a little piece of beautiful writing in the online magazine, Omnivore, that gave her game away. The style and content of Malted was similar to the new blog, Belle de Jour and says Darren “I was suddenly convinced I had the answer.”

This is what one of the judges, Bruce Sterling, of the Guardian’s best blog competition wrote about Belle de Jour when she won best written blog of 2003.
“Archly transgressive, anonymous hooker is definitely manipulating the blog medium, word by word, sentence by sentence far more effectively than any of her competitors. It’s not merely the titillating striptease aspects that are working for her, but her willingness to use this new form of vanity publishing to throw open a great big global window on activities previously considered unmentionable … She is in a league by herself as a blogger.”

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