3) Try to reply to all of your email messages within 48 hours. If not, many people get annoyed and will think you're avoiding them.

4) If you publish an ezine make sure you place subscribe and unsubscribe instructions at bottom of every issue.

5) Don't use foul language in an email; that will get you nowhere. If you're upset about something, please state problem clearly along with how you'd like to see issue can be resolved.

6) If you visit a website and it's not to your liking, don't fire off a nasty email stating what a loser site owner must be. Remember what your Mom use to say "If you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all."

7) Make sure every page of your website contains an email address to contact you. Please don't make me fill out a long form just to ask you a simple question.

8) When replying to an email, keep original message intact so person you're replying to knows what you're talking about. Personally I receive over 300 messages a day, so I need to see your message in context -- otherwise, I may not understand it.

9) If you buy or sell products/services online, make sure you're using an online payment service like PayPal.com in order to move money around quickly. Don't make snail mail your only payment option.

10) Pay your bills in a timely fashion. If you owe someone money online don't make them send out 10 emails telling you your payment is overdue. Pay promptly.

So there you have it; my Top 10 rules for being more polite and less rude online. If you incorporate these tips into your daily Internet dealings you'll find Net a little warmer and a friendlier place to be.

There's enough road rage in world, so when traveling information highway please remember that we're all human. Your computer is just a tool used to communicate with others. Please be KIND to them!

Suffice it to say that information, in information economy, has value we used to assign to precious metals or gemstones. When things have value, they are susceptible to theft, graft, bribes and criminal abuses by bad guys. Information is golden and precious. We need to define a new type of "Fort Knox" for information sources. Security, encryption and permission levels to access distribute, store and manage all types of information that exists in millions of databases that could all be easily merged.

I was told today of a web site that exists allowing you to send snail mail to someone by entering their email address in a web form. DoubleClick was thoroughly reamed for publicly announcing their intention to merge online and offline databases for exactly that ability, yet other companies are operating quietly without public outcry. Because they are doing it without telling us.

"I know what you did last night" may soon be a wonderful and welcome comment if it comes from your milk carton. Let's just keep that information in family of inanimate objects and out of hands of government, criminals, telemarketers and unsavory data warehousing software developers.

A recent privacy uproar concerns public posting of ICQ logs from PC of a web company CEO concerning internal private discussions over instant messaging service.

http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-5148422.html

In this case it was someone having access to same PC that led to security breach, but it has fired discussions about how instant messaging text is served and how and where it is stored and who has access to those logs, how they might be accessed externally and by whom and if they are encrypted.

This is un-nerving side of ease of access to information but there are also some seriously funny thoughts on privacy:

http://futurefeedforward.com/index.mv?pagename=newest20010401

The link above will take you to a hilarious article describing a "continuous series of detachable, 480x480-pixel square displays, complete with Bluetooth wireless communications!"

This "display" innovation may get more personal than you think since it comes as newest version of "Free Toilet Paper with Banner Ads".

Talk about getting personal with privacy issues!