You Can Run But You Just Can't Hide...

June for me was a very eventful month, nothing earth shattering but busy. I have taken on a project for a client in Costa Rica that takes up much of my time these days so blogging is a bit on the back burner for the moment. This, along with factoring in other things that have come up, has made my time a bit more scarce but that is no reason I should ignore this blog.

I'm chastising myself a bit for not keeping up and posting some of the things that I'm finding in and around the Interwebs. There has been so much happening on the websites I frequent but today I think I'd like to talk about the Internet and anonymity. People's ability to hide behind a monitor and keyboard and say whatever they like with virtually no repercussions.

Many of the forums that I belong to are very much proponents of freedom of speech and censor very little unless it's blatantly over the top. This includes things like racism, slander and of course, breaking their TOS by posting links to competing websites. Which is something I find quite amusing as if their businesses can't stand a bit of competition, then how are they going to survive in a market as big as the Internet?

Now, I'm not saying that they should let the spammers run rampant but when a legitimate forum member finds something of interest not only to them but an item that may benefit other members of the community, they should be allowed to impart this information. There are ways around it of course, such as posting the link in text and not as an actual hyperlink, i.e. www(dot)gotothiswebsite(dot)com.

Then we have the trash talkers. Those people who speak their minds, no matter how small they are, attacking whatever or whomever they do not understand. These people operate under the assumption that they will never meet those that they are taking shots at and debasing in a public arena. These are the ones that need to be gently reminded that while the Internet is a big place, the real world is not.

There are literally hundreds of websites that for a few dollars will reveal anything and everything they can find out about an individual. It wouldn't take long for someone to gather just a few scraps of information about another person and sign up to one of these websites. A name and location goes a very long way in finding the person that has been talking trash about another online.

For the most part, these pay websites are not even necessary. There are many of the social networking websites out there such as Face Book and MySpace that will pretty much tell you everything you ever wanted to know about the person. This is particularly true if they haven't figured out how to set the privacy settings.

So, to those folks who think it's fun to bad mouth and talk trash online, be careful. It is much easier to find you now then it ever was in the past.