Matt wants to know why blog comments bring out the worst in people.

It’s true that you can’t see non-verbal signals, but I believe the bigger reason is anonymity. The more of a composite identity that you represent (so readers “know” you), the better you’ll behave. Even if that identity departs somewhat from your meatspace persona, you have an investment in its social survival. How often have you seen the most caustic comments from someone who uses an obvious alias and leaves no URL?

You see this in online games as well. When completely anonymous, players can throw comment fits and even just walk away from the game, forcing the other player to have to resign instead just to end it. When players have an identity, even if it’s just a semi-permanent screen name that they’ll be known by in the future, they think twice.

That’s why, for my own integrity, I always post and comment using my real name. It forces me to be more real, because Google is watching us.

The fact that removing the “web as parent” causes us to degenerate into Lord of the Flies does not speak well for human nature.

Randy exposes a Ford dealership in Toronto for posting anonymous comments favorable to the dealership on Randy’s critical blog post. Apparently they didn’t realize that Randy could look up their IP. “Anonymity” and “the web” can’t be accurately used in the same sentence without a negation.

UnSpun, a community ranking site, is the first Rails application on Amazon.com. I like a few things about this list of best programming languages:
#1 = Ruby (my fave)
#7 = Lisp (of which I am still in awe)
#22 = Synergy/DE (which I helped design/develop)

TDavid says that Firefox 2 still has memory leaks. Since upgrading to version 2, I haven’t had to close it to free up memory at all, and in version 1.5 that was a regular activity. Could be all those extensions, er I mean add-ons, TD. Although after an initial startup size of about 23MB, it does use up to between 180-200MB on my system after opening and closing a few tabs. But then it seems to level off.

Megite answers my question about the images they extract for their site.

Vaspers the Grate once again develops a comment he left here into a thought-provoking, almost poetic post. Nice to be the sketch-pad for such creativity.

Signs you spend too much time in the blogosphere (SF edition). excerpt:

You meet new people, and really resent the lack of an ‘About’ page attached to their forehead.

Happy Blogday, Kiltak! Keep up the good work.

Thanks for the plug, MP! Congrats on getting moved to mpschulze.net.

And also thanks to Cori Schlegel for linking to my FeedBurner redirection hack for WordPress.