I need to say this before I give up blogging all together.

In looking for new reading material on the internet, I have come across numerous blogs by women who are good writers and communicate fairly well. But I have also seen A LOT of nastiness on the 'net.

Most often nastiness comes out in the commenters. There are surf-by trolls, stalkers, know it alls, judgers, and down right nasty b!tches out there. But just as often I have seen women use their blogs as a fountain of nastiness. Of course this makes it easy to just surf away and never return, but it begs the question of WHY??

I have a feeling that there are a lot of women bloggers out there using their blogs to vent their venom because they have no other outlet in their real lives. Because there is no way anyone will ever convince me that these women speak like this in real life.

That's the thing about blogs. They are a one way communication tunnel void of any sort of responsibility. They never have to face people and say the words they type and they never have to face any sort of consequence. I have followed (as a matter of research, of course) several online battles where women act no older than highschool girls.

Because there are online communities out there that are no more than little clique-y groups of women who gang up on those that oppose them and basically harass them until the bigger party grows up. I've seen comments about someone's education, how much money they make, suppositions about why someone is 'screwed up' or their marital status, their 'issues'. It's all so judgemental that it pains me to read it.

It's not that I have never sinned in this arena. I have. I believe that someone recently pointed out that I was in fact wearing my 'asshat' around the internet... and I couldn't disagree. It's why I began to go looking for positive things to read and to see just what was out there that I might be missing.

(The links on the right there ---> are REALLY GOOD ONES)

But it does not seem that many people are very adept at saying "I like the colour blue" without writing it like "I like the colour blue and those who like the colour green are so stupid they should be sterilized and don't even get me started on yellow because those people have issues."

It's blogging diarrhea, that's what is out there. You don't have to look very far.

So I have a challenge for those of you considering blogging, try to use it as a force for good rather than evil.