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In fact, some would argue that she's just the most visible - if not the most historically egregious - tip of an iceberg that has been around since internet discussions began in the early 1980s.

"Between now and the early days of Usenet, the level of abusive behaviour has been distressingly constant," says Tim Bray, a veteran blogger and director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems.

The difference is, with 70 million blogs in existence today and 1.4 new blogs created every second, according to blog search engine Technorati, there are just more people participating in online discussions, and "the more crazy people you've got reading them, the wilder the whole blogosphere can become," says Richard Silverstein, who advocates for a peaceful approach to solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in his blog.

And he should know.

Like Sierra, Silverstein is the victim of online harassment, in the form of hostile comments on his own blog, in external discussion groups and on blogs created solely for the purpose of maligning him.

Given the topic that he blogs about, Silverstein is no stranger to abusive commentary.

"It's part of the territory - if you want to write a blog like this, you're going to deal with unpalatable people," he says.

But when the external blogs - whose creators were anonymous - grew increasingly threatening, including what he saw as pornographic photographs, he began to feel personally harassed....

It will be interesting to see if Baidu "gets" Japan.

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I don't know if anyones going to be able to ...