Please apply the following rules to discussion boards, comments entries, and Facebook and Twitter postings if you wish to raise collective blood pressure.

1. Use all caps. I CAN’T BELIEVE HOW MANY PEOPLE DO THIS EVEN THOUGH THEY’VE BEEN WARNED AGAINST IT FOR YEARS.
2. Stay off topic, perhaps discussing the demise of the semicolon, one of the most misunderstood pieces of punctuation. You can use the semicolon to join two independent clauses that bear a close relationship; a period is sometimes just too much. Independent clauses can stand on their own as sentences, but a semicolon can bring two of them together. Wait. Where was I?
3. Make it personal if you disagree with someone. As in, “You don’t like cilantro? You’re a pathetic and ugly sad sack.”
4. Jump to the end of a discussion without reading the whole thing. That way you can make clueless statements or ask obvious questions that cause everyone to write you off.
5. Slip little spammy messages into your postings.  (Seriously, though. Click here to read more about how you can be a better person for $9.99 per month.)
6. Curse like a **** sailor.
7. Make sure 2 use ur worst speling n grammar.
8. Post irrelevant personal messages to everyone. (Andrea: doesn’t this remind you of the time you threw that flaming marshmallow at Travis’s head?)
9. Be sarcastic. E.g., “Smooth move, ExLax.”
10. Hit Submit before you’ve finish

[Image: Flickr user devittj]

The best thing about the Web – and Web 2.0 in particular – is that you have a direct link to millions of people around you. When it comes to finding answers to questions, it’s like having access to a huge brain.

Nothing says “huge brain” to me more than MetaFilter, a loosey-goosey blog/forum that anybody can post a comment or question to. It’s open to the masses to read or use.

My favorite part is Ask MetaFilter (AskMeFi). People from all over ask the most random questions, many of which you’d actually like to know the answers to. Such as:

• “I won a trip! But where should I go? I’ve got six choices.”
• “My former employer is telling me to make my COBRA payments directly to them (the employer). That doesn’t seem right to me. Is this common/legal/legitimate?”
• “Should we do anything about our neighbors stealing our cable and crippling our broadband for the past 2 months?”

Our clients ask me why they should have a forum or discussion board, and this is why. This is a forum in the most wonderful sense. It’s clean and couldn’t be simpler. It’s just people putting their brains together.