ID Differentiation online

I find it very interesting how many people assume that a person can only have one interest or hobby, that they can only do one thing. To me this seems very limiting.

For example, as one of my interests I write. I write articles, poetry, stories, games, books and now novels. And this apparently causes a problem. I have been told outright that I should stop writing the award-winning steam train articles simply because I don't work in the field, that a thriller publisher won't pick me up because my name is linked with horror, etc. The obvious solution to this would be ID differentiation: writing under different names on different subjects.

Unfortunately the web now appears to be trying to make everything about one person be under one ID. The trend is to link everything up. This can make life tricky for anyone with more than one interest, or people who want to work in more than one field. It can also make it difficult to keep work and social life seperate.

And I find this trend very odd.

Strangely I might not want my pre-teen fans who are largely engineering nuts (Hi guys!) to find my horror work if they look me up online.What you say in a discussion for adults might not be what you say in one for kids, or simply not said the same way - A frank discussion of Incan sacrifical practices comes to mind. What I say to a client professionally has nothing to do with what the horror fans like, and I really would not want a horror fan looking me up through my work*. Also what I do out-of-hours is none of a clients' business as long as it would not adversely affect their reputation, which it does not.

The problem with using different names to seperate work and social - or even work and hobbies - is that Twitter and others now insist you have to give your real name and can only give one email address. More than one such service limits you to one account. This leaves people with multiple interests in a bind. Do you lie on your application or link all the content to one name and lose the different groups?

This to me is symptomatic of a greater issue: the increasing belief that I have encountered that people can only be good at one thing. I find this limiting and disappointing. One of the highest achievements for an individual used to be to be a polymath - someone who excelled and made notable contributions in multiple fields. Now it seems to be that once you've worked in one field, you are not supposed to have any interest in anything else and to me this sells people short. I'm old-fashioned.  I think that everything can be interesting and narrowing yourself to finding enjoyment from one narrow activity is doing yourself a disservice.

After all, as they say, only boring people get bored.

Rant over, and on to ways to manage this:
Multiple accounts are the simplest. This can be tricky to manage, but if you have access to multiple web browsers, each can be configured differently. (e.g. I use Firefox for article-writing, Opera for games interests etc.) with different bookmarks etc.

Some services can handle multiple accounts, so with those you are OK. With others it might be harder, and leave you looking at different services that do the same thing. You can also change what it says under name once the account is set up e.g. my Twitter account.

How would you manage it?