In 1999, a freighter ran aground on the Oregon coast, then broke apart, spilling its fuel oil. The response to the accident was difficult and controversial, and very much in the public spotlight. At that time, I managed a government website that provided frequent news updates about the response. Our site was inundated with visitors, and I got all the emails sent to the webmaster.

Many of those emails were so filled with hatred and vitriol that they astonished me. It was my first encounter with the phenomenon of flaming. Generally, I wrote back with a polite answer to the writer's question or concern, thanking them for their concern for our coastal environment, and signing my responses with my own name.

More often than not, I received a reply. It's not that the writers apologized--as I remember it, none did--but the replies all had a contrite tone, and the writers thanked me for my work. I could tell that they had imagined they were addressing a faceless government drudge, not a real woman with a name and personality.

I thought of that experience last week when I saw something similar happen to my good friend Tim Harris. Tim runs Real Change, Seattle's street paper. The Seattle Weekly, for reasons that aren't clear to me, chose to write an investigative piece about Real Change's policies for employing vendors. I suppose that they had expected to find shoddy practices, but the eventual article revealed none. An altercation arose after Tim wrote a criticism of the upcoming article on his own blog shortly before the article appeared in print, and the Weekly took offense (actually, when Tim wrote that post, I doubt that he expected that more than 8 - 10 people would read it, counting his wife).

I know Tim to be a kind, dedicated man who has worked courageously and smartly to keep his paper alive, thereby building opportunities for homeless and at-risk people to earn a little money and build connections with the community around them. But in the comment threads on the Weekly website and elsewhere, I saw Tim described as the deranged author of a bizarre diatribe, and suspected of sneakily making money off the impoverished. It all seemed so familiar!

During the early years of the World Wide Web, I expected that the Internet would help to develop understanding among different people, by giving people a chance to communicate freely together. Sadly, something about being able to speak anonymously brings out the worst in many people, and so often poisons online conversations. Still, there's hope. As the New York Times reports, thoughtful bloggers are searching for ways to build civility online. The trick is to build civility without unduly constraining writers, as Monica Guzman notes.