Well, the origin of this is pretty simple: it seemed like a pretty frequent format on DailyKos (matt in nyc, Bill in Portland Maine, etc) so I just used it like this with my name and city.

As to internet personalities, my experience from meetups and YearlyKos is that poster's real personalities cannot be hidden from the forum - I was struck time and again by the profound identity between people's posts and their real life personalities. The real surprise was the physical world - looks, age, gender have all been unexpected for various persons.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes