"I have serious ethical concerns for those who apparently wrap themselves in the First Amendment but exhibit no responsibility, no accountability, and no respect for those who are personally harmed by the material posted on the Web sites they host," said Thios in an e-mail to The Sun.
Mann said he believes Denison "has no case" but that, having no legal counsel or financial budget, he and his partners did not want to risk a fight and they shut down the site.
Mann agreed to talk publicly for the first time about JHUConfessions.com only after learning through a reporter that Hopkins officials had pledged not to punish him or hold up his graduation next month.
"This is a great project and lots of fun ... but there's a constant fear of legal problems," said Mann, 22, who along with two friends at Connecticut's Wesleyan University launched the Hopkins site with just several hundred dollars and has watched its popularity skyrocket from roughly 2,500 page-views that month to about 500,000 in April.
Encouraged by the popularity of the Hopkins site, CollegeACB has also launched sites focused on Haverford College, Dickinson College, the University of Vermont and Ohio Wesleyan University. Mann said they plan to spend the summer developing social-networking features to the sites and will launch a new version in the fall aimed at as many as 200 campuses. The ultimate goal: to try to capitalize on the commercial potential of online communities such as Facebook and LiveJournal.
"Astronomers don't make a lot of money," said Mann, who will start a Ph.D. program in astrophysics at the University of Hawaii later this year.
Timonium resident Patrick Nagle, 25, a Towson University dropout who sold the anonymous teacher-evaluation site RateMyProfessors.com to media giant Viacom last year, said he thinks CollegeACB has promise as a business venture. "People are very interested in true opinion, and people thrive off of gossip," Nagle said. "The one thing I really like about the business is how localized the site is and the fact that it's not this conglomerate product that's trying to appeal to everyone."
RateMyProfessors and Nagle's similar new venture RateMyTeachers.com, which focuses on the high school market, also depend on the promise of user anonymity to generate an online community. "People are more comfortable expressing themselves and their true feelings anonymously," Nagle said, "but you have to be very careful of flamers or just people who are trying to harm someone else's name."
