‘Publish his address, e-mail and telephone number and his whole life could become . . . how can we say, rather difficult.” So begins the cyber-witch-hunt for the reporter who outed the cult police blogger Night Jack last week.

The naming of Richard Horton, the Lancashire officer, has prompted an online debate that has been seen as a fight between “old” and “new” media, coupled with vicious slurs and personal attacks on the writers involved. It’s a nasty business and one I know all too well.

Three summers ago, while on work experience at The Sunday Times, I wrote a story outing a sex blogger, Zoe Margolis, who had just turned her online collection of back-alley exploits into a book titled Girl with a One Track Mind. The writer’s anonymity was used as a marketing gimmick and the piece was the first high-profile “exposé” of an online writer’s anonymity; I promptly became public enemy No 1 in the blogosphere.

Hundreds of fresh character assassinations surfaced each day. Feminist blogs described me as a sexist “traitor” with “no grasp of female solidarity” and the rest spoke of their strong suspicion that I was the kind of person who goes out at night in a dark cloak and strangles kittens in their sleep. I heard of calls attempting to find out my home address, offers to come over and break my legs (in answer to the paper’s own doorstepping of Margolis for the story), and it felt as if a mob were baying for my blood.

Within days my enemies had devised the perfect revenge: my very own fake sex blog, gloriously entitled Spank Me, Rupert. Of course it was created (and for some six months updated) behind a veil of anonymity. As I was still a student I didn’t take the attacks too seriously and while it’s not pleasant being pilloried as the embodiment of journalism’s faults, it isn’t the end of the world. Over time, though, things worsened: my tormentors gave details of where I studied and lived, then posted a photo of me.

It was only when I started full-time work that I realised how deeply I was being damaged. I would turn up to a meeting with new contacts and be greeted with a hesitant: “I’ve seen your blog.” Cue an extensive effort by the Sunday Times legal team to take it down — successfully, thank goodness.

Last week the anonymous, many-headed beast of the blogosphere was once again stirred into full fury after a High Court judge allowed the naming of Horton, the serving police constable who wrote as Night Jack. Mr Justice Eady said blogging was a “public rather than a private activity” and Horton would not automatically be guaranteed anonymity just for writing under a pseudonym.

Horton, whose vivid description of the day-to-day life of a copper had won the Orwell prize for political writing earlier this year, has received a written warning from his constabulary that some of his posts fell short of the professional standards expected of police officers.

The backlash on the internet against the ruling has been ferocious. That’s not to say there have not been many well argued and engaging debates on the nature of anonymity and its benefits. (Rightly so: you have only to look at the extraordinary blogs coming out of Iran to see that the case for anonymity can be overwhelming.)

The argument, however, has been dragged down by a host of personal attacks against both Eady and Patrick Foster, the Times journalist who found out Night Jack’s identity. For his pains, in the past week Foster has been labelled online as everything from an unscrupulous hack to a rapist.

Most of these attacks are carried out by people who think Chicken Yoghurt is an appropriate pseudonym and who believe that writing something unpunctuated and in capitals makes it MORE TRUE. Now, nutters aside, undoubtedly new media are an important forum for opinion and self-expression, but as blogs grow in credibility and importance, the problems posed by their unregulated outlaw status increase.

Every national newspaper has a legal team to check stories for defamatory content and to see if they serve the public interest. Few blogs can say the same. If bloggers were made aware that their anonymity was not always absolutely guaranteed, then arguably they would be just a tiny bit more careful. So perhaps the occasional outing is just the level of control that the blogging community needs.