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The email was from Greg Prince, my co-blogger at Faith and Fear in Flushing, and the subject line alone made me brace for impact: “Another FAFIF – WTF?” I followed the link Greg supplied and found myself on a Mets blog – a Mets blog also called Faith and Fear in Flushing.

It had only been up for a couple of days, and so far it was innocuous stuff – your basic offseason speculation, other teams’ news, and so forth. But it had the same name Greg and I had thought of nearly six years ago, the name we’d worked enormously hard to make both recognizable and our own. And it was not, I thought to myself, the kind of name someone would come up with independently.

Once I stopped processing what I was seeing and started to think, my reaction surprised me: I was livid. “Livid,” in fact, only vaguely captured what I was feeling. It was teeth-bared outrage.

I tried to remind myself of things I’d written before, of cool, logical arguments penned when I wasn’t getting hit where I lived. I reminded myself that finding something on the web isn’t the same as anybody else finding it – the fact that something upsetting fills your screen after just a click doesn’t mean it has a mass audience, or any audience at all. I told myself that this blog was so new it was likely Google’s spiders hadn’t even found it yet – and if they had, it would rank far below more than 3,000 of our posts.

But it didn’t help. Like I said, livid.

I did some hunting around for the blog host’s terms of service, and wrote down what we’d have to do to prove that that name was ours. (Nothing too onerous, I was glad to see.) I thought of the Mets bloggers who’d help us exert some public pressure, if it came to that – there’s nothing like web shaming to inspire change.

That was about when I realized I was getting slightly unhinged. Why was I getting lost in vengeful fantasies when what I really wanted was to make an issue go away?

I looked for the author’s contact information and couldn’t find an email link, so I left a public comment on the most-recent post. (Stick with me for why I’m neither identifying the author nor linking to the blog.) My comment was seethingly polite – I introduced myself, noted how long our blog had been around, and requested that this new blogger change the name of his effort, so we could conclude the identical names were a strange coincidence and not evidence of dishonesty. I made sure the comment linked to my email address, hit POST, and then reloaded for about 15 minutes, getting madder each time there was no response before I realized that was insane.

I’m happy to say the problem is solved. (Though I’ll keep my eye on things.) I got an apologetic email from the blog author the next day. He’d apparently gotten the title from Greg’s book, which shares our blog’s name. He’d changed the name and was working on changing the web address. And finally, he said something that mollified me where the rest of the email hadn’t: “I'm a senior in high school so I'm still making mistakes haha.”

I could have done without the “haha,” but I knew what he meant. Because I certainly made mistakes when I was that age, including ones that still cause me pain when it’s 3 a.m. and I’m staring at the ceiling.

I’ll tell you one that torments me to this day, and rightly so. I was the sports editor of my high-school paper, and it fell to me to do the 1987 baseball preview. I knew the National League pretty well, and prognosticated merrily for an undisciplined 20-odd inches or so. The American League, though, was something else – I knew little beyond the particulars of the recently defeated Boston Red Sox. So I turned to the Sports Illustrated baseball issue for help. Ron Fimrite had picked the mediocre Cleveland Indians to win it all, and with no working hypothesis of my own, that sounded good to me.

I didn’t nick Fimrite’s words – I at least knew that was wrong. But I certainly nicked his idea and his argument — I hadn’t figured out yet that that was wrong, too. Or perhaps I had, but I hadn’t developed the awareness or the character to translate knowing that into behaving differently because of it. In other words, I was still shy of 18 years old, with plenty of mistakes yet to go. (By the way, the Indians lost 101 games and finished seventh, and SI’s pick of them remains infamous nearly a quarter-century later. Every time it’s been mentioned, I’ve blanched a bit for my own reasons.)

There’s a key difference between the me of 1987 and the kid who nicked our blog’s name in 2010, though: My mistakes weren’t public. With the exception of the one I just owned up to, the evidence of them is limited to moldering paper or maybe microfilm somewhere. My baseball preview didn’t elicit a seething email from Ron Fimrite, or mockery from people who’d read his piece and wanted to know what, exactly, had led me to predict my own Indian Uprising.

There is no high-school wing of the Internet, and there are no weight classes for blogging: Those who are just learning their footwork are in the ring with battle-scarred heavyweights.

In some ways this is exhilarating. The web is a talent show that anyone can enter, including those who a generation ago would have been ineligible because they were too young or lacked a credential or didn’t know the right people. I find all that wonderful.

But there’s another side to that. On the web, our mistakes are public, magnified and attached to us forever – even the ones that are part of the learning process we all have to endure. And I’m not sure that’s for the best.

Jason Fry is a freelance writer and media consultant in Brooklyn, N.Y. He spent more than 12 years at The Wall Street Journal Online, serving as a writer, columnist, editor and projects guy. While at WSJ.com he edited and co-wrote The Daily Fix, a daily roundup of the best sportswriting online. He blogs about the Mets at Faith and Fear in Flushing, and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom. Write to him at  jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook, or follow him on Twitter.on Fry is a freelance writer and media consultant in Brooklyn, N.Y. He spent more than 12 years at The Wall Street Journal Online, serving as a writer, columnist, editor and projects guy. While at WSJ.com he edited and co-wrote The Daily Fix, a daily roundup of the best sportswriting online. He blogs about the Mets at Faith and Fear in Flushing, and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom. Write to him at  jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook, or follow him on Twitter.