They are more commonly known as trolls.

Online residents who seem to have too much time and too little regard for the usual decorum and courtesy that go with inter-human relations, these people seem to exist mainly for the purpose of vexing everyone else online.

You see them each time you go to a Web site’s comments section. There, they post rude, crude, and grating commentaries on things, events, other people and trolls, and anything else under the sun, except anything that is even remotely related to the original topic.

Apparently, they cherish those occasions when other posters lose their cool and respond to their posts and ranting. In fact, they seem to live for that and nothing else.

They do not contribute anything to the discussion at hand. In fact, they do not contribute anything that could, even in the smallest way, contribute to the advancement of the human race — except, maybe, to mankind’s efforts to finally learn to manage anger.

YouTube and Anonymous Users

Fortunately, the world’s most famous online video-sharing site has seen the light.

YouTube started encouraging its users to post videos and comments with their full name. If they happen to be a Google+ user, YouTube urges them to associate their account with their identity on the video-sharing site.

Requiring commenters and posters to use their real names and Google+ accounts can go a long way toward removing obnoxiousness from YouTube’s comments section, which is quite notorious for its free-for-all online brawls of cussing, foul-mouthed resident posters.

The next few weeks will tell us how successful YouTube’s “cleansing” efforts will be. This corner hopes the Web site’s campaign will succeed in weeding out meanness and profanity from its online premises.

Let us hope the other most-visited Web sites follow suit.

Twitter’s Olympic Debut

The London Olympics is set to become the most social media heavy yet in the games’ history.

Even before the games started, videos of athletes in training, corporate sponsors’ marketing campaigns, and other related promotions had been posted on YouTube and other video-sharing sites.

Facebook pages, athletes’ personal walls, and fan pages have created maximum hype for the Olympic Games.

Meanwhile, Twitter has allowed games organizers, sponsors, and athletes to stay in touch with their followers. Twitter’s unofficial Olympic role has gotten so big, it has become the de facto communication platform.

Like everything else, however, it has its not-so-pretty side. And Greece’s triple-jump athlete, Paraskevi Paphristou knows this more than anybody else does.

After posting a comment on her Twitter account, which many other Twitter users found disparaging of African immigrants in Greece, she was promptly removed from her country’s Olympic team.

Moreover, Twitter’s big Olympic moment could be spoiled by outages, similar to what happened days before the opening of the London games. Caused by a datacenter failure, last week’s incident was the microblogging service’s second outage in five weeks.

Such incidents can seriously tarnish Twitter’s reputation and its reliability.

That’s all for the meantime, folks. Join me again next time as we keep on watching IT.