Wired Cola

Ms. Fowler of the eponymous blog has a post up on trolls and bad behavior in the blogosphere.

She's right about one key thing: there are real-world consequences to this stuff. Bad behavior, even by anonymous trolls, can cause people to just stop writing.

She also has a reasonable guide to decent behavior online, albeit one that will only be of use to people predisposed to be reasonable. And one does not have to be online for very long to learn that some people are not predisposed to be reasonable, and not all of them are spammers.

If you like, here's a history lesson on anonymous content. Here's a short, foulmouthed, and very accurate explanation of anonymous online behavior. And here's my set of rules for avoiding anonymous trolls:

• don’t blog
  
• blog anonymously
  
• don't put your email address online
  
• moderate your comments
  
• don't have comments
  
• only post on Facebook/mySpace/some other walled garden, where you can control who your friends and readers are.

And that's it. Basically, anywhere you get spammed is essentially vulnerable to anonymous trolling. And to a certain extent, some people are willing to put their trolls under their own names. What are you going to do? If criticism, including unreasonable criticism, is going to bother you, then you're not going to like what happens when you publish your work.