As his fledgling Internet blog analyzing the Duke lacrosse case grew in popularity, KC Johnson made a conscious decision to hold himself to the same intellectual standards while blogging that he lives by at his day job as a college professor in New York.

"I have my own professional reputation within higher education," Johnson said recently. "If I produce something on the Web that's all rumor and innuendo ... that's going to reflect badly on me."

But not every blogger has a professional reputation to protect. Far from it, in fact. Bloggers -- including 12 million adult Americans, according to a study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project -- fit no stereotype. There are bloggers of all ethnicities, ages and political backgrounds, but they have one thing in common: the ability to communicate freely with the world from the comfort of home with as much anonymity as they like.

With that in mind, some ethicists and Internet junkies have crafted their own codes of ethics, policies they'd like to see followed by bloggers, be they policy wonks commenting on politics or suburban teenagers critiquing a classmate's wardrobe. The problem is, blogging is so vast that it is nearly uncontrollable. Bloggers -- known collectively as the "blogosphere" -- need not be licensed, pass any test or register with any regulatory agency. They can follow a code of ethics if they choose. Or not.

"A lot of bloggers see themselves as these First Amendment cowboys," said Martin Kuhn, who crafted his own blogging ethics code recently while a graduate student at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication. " 'Hey, we'll say what we want! Nobody tells us what to say.' "

A blog -- a term shortened from "Web log" -- is basically an active, Web-based diary through which a person can offer largely unedited thoughts and musings on all manner of topics. A blog has a stream-of-consciousness feel to it; you type out a thought and it immediately hits the screen, inviting reaction. Bloggers tend to control content by selecting the topics and vetting reactions before allowing them to be posted.

But bloggers are just as liable as mainstream journalists for what they write, and they can be sued for libel, experts say. That stark truth is playing out in courtrooms around the country, with bloggers beginning to realize the real-world ramifications of the snide comment fired into cyberspace.

Lawsuits are one risk

In Washington, one former U.S. Senate aide sued another over a blog that detailed their sexual dalliances. In Boston, a lawyer who wrote an angry blog item accusing a city councilman of being drunk after the councilman rear-ended him saw that blog entry work against him in court. The councilman's attorney introduced the blog entry as evidence that the attorney's testimony was politically motivated. And in San Antonio, an assistant principal sued two of her high school students, accusing them of defaming her by posting her picture and lewd comments on Myspace.com, a popular social networking Web site.

"The lawsuits coming out are a hard life lesson that you're talking to the whole world, including people who are not in your private circle and can be hurt by what you have to say," said Dave Heller, an attorney with the New York City-based Media Law Resource Center, which tracks blog lawsuits.

At least 50 lawsuits have been filed in the past two years related to message board posts and blog entries. In September, a south Florida woman won an $11.3 million verdict in an Internet defamation lawsuit after another woman called her a "crook," a "fraud" and a "con artist" on an Internet message board, according to news reports. A message board is different from a blog. It's more of a virtual community meeting where people can exchange thoughts on equal terms.

Though there hasn't yet been a landmark verdict holding a blogger liable for unfair commentary, the blogosphere is taking notice.

"There will be a case where a blogger gets socked with a major judgment and loses his home, and it's going to be a wakeup call for a lot of people out there," said Robert Cox, founder of the Media Bloggers Association.

"Bloggers think of themselves as writers, not publishers. Very few bloggers have any concept of the legal risk they're running with their blogs," said Cox, who created his association in 2004 after The New York Times tried to shut down his blog because it included a satire of that newspaper's corrections page.

In working toward his doctorate at UNC, Kuhn realized that, for the most part, ethics codes targeted primarily bloggers who acted journalistically, commenting on world affairs and current events and attempting -- to varying degrees -- to maintain certain ethical standards.

But Kuhn thinks the blogosphere is broader than that. So he devised an ethics code of his own, a set of general principles he thinks all bloggers should follow. They stress openness and personal responsibility, and Kuhn urges bloggers to be "as transparent as possible" by identifying themselves by name and with as much personal information as they're comfortable with.

"There's no such thing as identity in cyberspace," he said. "You can say you're a 90-year-old man, or a 14-year-old girl. In cyberspace, you never know where people are coming from."

As good as you can make it

Johnson, the college professor who blogs about the Duke lacrosse case, believes in the value of unvarnished truth. A Maine native who teaches history at Brooklyn College, Johnson, 38, has no tie to Durham aside from a few visits over the years. Nevertheless, he has fixated on the enormously high-profile Duke lacrosse case, turning his own outrage over District Attorney Mike Nifong's handling of it into a lively, popular and occasionally scathing blog through which he posts daily critiques and criticisms of Nifong, other players in the case and the media.

He spends a couple of hours each day working on the blog, which, he said, is read by between 15,000 and 20,000 people each week. His blog entries are heavy with detail culled from public records. On occasion, he has corrected errors on his blog.

"If I was going to do this blog, it had to be as good as I could possibly make it," he said recently. "You can't put up wrong things and expect your product to be treated seriously."

Working in the snakepit that is the ACC sports scene, David Glenn occasionally sees the anonymity of the Internet bring out the absolute worst in people. The editor of the ACC Area Sports Journal, Glenn also posts twice a week to a blog he uses to dispense information he has reported and researched that may not find a home in the sports journal.

Though he has been doing this for a long while now, Glenn said he's still surprised from time to time at the vitriol and inaccuracy that stream into his blog and on other local Web sites devoted to college athletics. He and his Web host -- WRAL.com -- are vigilant about reading comments before they're posted, he said.

"There are an overwhelming number of people who are too lazy to look up the facts, or too mean-spirited to care about being fair to the person they're criticizing," Glenn said. "I would never filter something out because I disagree with it, or because it was critical of me. You just have to show a willingness to be fair."

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