In a long piece on audience participation at mainstream media sites, Mark Glaser of MediaShift asks:

How do you harness the audience’s knowledge and participation without the forums devolving into a messy online brawl that requires time-intensive moderation?

High-traffic blogs face the same question. Here are several links to earlier parts of the cross-blog conversation:

• Chris Tolles of Topix: Anonymous Comments – By The Numbers - Jan. 8
• Rich Skrenta (formerly of Topix) covers 4 downsides of registration - Jan. 8
• Howard Owens (a newspaper guy) has some quibbles and further points - Jan. 9
• Scott Anderson of Online News Squared: X-Raying The Cloak of Anonymity - Jan. 9

Several of the posts have lots of good comments.