Joe Smith, who lives at 12 main street, wants to censor this blog!

Slashdot is reporting that Americans are in favor of blog censorship.

Oh, the humanity. Will Mad Anthony no longer be able to make jokes involving the word poop?

No. What people said is they don't think bloggers should publish personal information like home addresses on blogs - 80% don't want it about private citizens, and 62% don't want it about elected officials.

Now, here's the thing. People tend to see laws as the answer to everything, so when they see a problem their response is to solve it by passing a law against it - even if doing so is basically unconsititutional.

But while free speech dicatates that it's legal to publish people's home addresses on your blog, that doesn't mean that people should. I can't think of any good reason to do so, and I can think of lots of good reasons not to, like exposing people to theft or vandalism or physical harm.

That isn't to say that most people's home addresses can't be found with a phone book or 5 minutes of googling. But people are lazy, and you throw, say, a picture of an abortion doctor up on a web page along with their address, a map to their house, and some comments about them being a murderer, and it makes it a lot more likely to happen.

So even though publishing people's names and addresses is legal and should be, that doesn't mean that it should be done, and it doesn't mean that people are wrong to be P.O'ed when it is.