Via Mark Bernstein, I ran across a post from Joel Spolsky on comments in blogs.

"When a blog allows comments right below the writer's post, what you get is a bunch of interesting ideas, carefully constructed, followed by a long spew of noise, filth, and anonymous rubbish that nobody ... nobody ... would say out loud if they had to take ownership of their words. Look at this innocent post on a real estate blog. By comment #6 you're already seeing complete noise. By #13 you have someone cursing and saying "go kill yourself." On a real estate blog. #18 and #23 have launched into a middle eastern nuclear conflageration which continues for 100 posts."

I haven't attracted too many trolls to this blog, but anyone with decent traffic can get buried in anonymous (unrelated) nonsense fairly easily. Sure, if you run a political blog, you have to see that coming. But on a real estate blog?