the net = anonymous nudists, then? ;-) mmmmm, yeah, steep them herbs! mom wants a cuppa.

I would think it would depend on the list & the personal-ness of the discussion. When I took a genetic biotechnology class & had to do a paper on the ethics of genetic testing, I briefly joined a discussion list for victims of Huntington's disease (making the other participants aware of my status as a researcher & not a patient/family of a patient) - I used their comments in the paper, but of course I wouldn't have used them in public or identified them without their permission. I haven't seen anything yet on the ethnomusicology list that would remotely qualify as too personal to repeat. "I'm doing a study on gamelin music" hardly qualifies!