What you post online could get you sued, an article in the Wall Street Journal cautions.

“Bloggers are increasingly getting sued or threatened with legal action for everything from defamation to invasion of privacy to copyright infringement,” the story by M.P. McQueen says.

McQueen’s reporting found:

• 106 civil lawsuits against bloggers and others in social networks and online forums in 2007. Just four years earlier, there were only 12 suits.

• $17.4 million in trial awards against bloggers.

The WSJ article states:

The number of blogger lawsuits is likely to keep rising as the number of people who post online continues to grow, says Sandra Baron, executive director of the Media Law Resource Center and a media-law attorney. Social-networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace — which is owned by News Corp., the parent company of The Wall Street Journal — and microblogging services like Twitter are making it easy for impetuous remarks to reach thousands of users in a matter of minutes.

…The jump in lawsuits is due to the phenomenal growth in online publishing and the number of people engaged in blogging and social-networking activity, experts say. “What people used to post on a bathroom wall can now be seen by millions,” says Ms. Baron.

At the same time, companies are increasingly employing automated technology to scour the Internet for copyrighted material and negative remarks. As a result, Web sites that purport to rate everything from college professors to doctors and contractors are being sued by recipients of disparaging reviews, according to the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.