> You can also choose to anonymize yourself by choosing a nick that best represents something you're interested
> in or identify with that is not used on other social spheres. It really is completely up to you on what you feel most
> comfortable with and there is typically no hard/fast rules.

One thing to keep in mind is that your nick might be anonymous, but
irc in general is done "in the clear"  and some connection information
will be published by default. I think that's partially a legacy of how
long IRC has been around.

When someone logs into a channel you'll see something like
[log in to unmask]  There's ways to "cloak" that id by
registering that nick and donating some money to the organization that
runs freenode, pdpc.  That's a bit trickier to setup.  The user
registration faq of freenode can be useful:
http://freenode.net/faq.shtml#userregistration.

So when someone who is registered and "cloaked" logs in, the
connection will display something like [log in to unmask] has
joined the channel.  - I can't remember the exactg string).

So just know that if someone is logging the channel (which is
possible, there's plenty of clients and ways to do it) and you come in
several times with different nicks but the same network address
they'll know it's likely the same person.

Jon Gorman