HELL hath no fury like a woman scorned - Mr Philip Smith, 74, a theatre executive, learnt it first hand this week, when his soon-to-be ex-wife aired their dirty linen via YouTube.

In the six-minute video clip, Ms Tricia Walsh Smith, 25, said that they had never had sex, and yet she had found him hoarding Viagra, pornography and condoms.

Mr Philip Smith's lawyer, Mr David Aronson, called the video 'appalling' and said his client was a very private person.

But Mr Smith's embarrassment is a sign of the times - with more than one in 10 adult online users in the US writing blogs, many are using the Internet to tell their side of a marital saga, reported the New York Times.

Accord to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, the number of personal blogs has quadrupled in five years.

Ms Mary Madden, a senior researcher with the Pew Project who specialises in online relationships, said that some people go online during times of emotional stress.

'It is a blank slate to unload all the frustrations and emotions of a personal crisis,' Ms Madden said.

But there will also be consequences for personal blogging. 'People tend to think that they are blogging for a small group of friends or that they are anonymous,' she said.

But that is not really the case, she said, because 'all it takes is one friend posting a link to your blog to out you.'

Laurie, a Manhattan mother, started podcasting DivorcingDaze.com during her divorce in 2006.

Each week Laurie and a divorced friend have a glass of wine and tape their discussions of the day's topics - spas, their boyfriends, Eliot Spitzer - and then post to the web.

Laurie never told her ex-husband what she was doing because they were intended as therapy and not retribution, she said.

Although she keeps their identities guarded, Laurie doesn't hold back - the 10,000 monthly listeners to her site have heard the story of how she discovered her ex-husband was having an affair with his boss from e-mails on his BlackBerry, and that her ex-husband had told his older daughter he wasn't cheating because their marriage, in his mind, was already over.

When her husband found out about the podcasts last year, he sued her. He argued that they included statements that were 'obnoxious, derogatory or offensive' and that it violated the terms of the divorce settlement that she not 'harass' or 'malign' him.

But a New York state Supreme Court justice decided a few week ago that his complaints were not grounds for blocking the podcast.

While Laurie's statements may be 'ill-advised and do no promote co-parenting', the court wrote, they were covered by the First Amendment.

For some bitter ex-spouses, the delight of revenge is not the only reward. Writing about divorce can be good for business.

'The bloggers who are doing the best are those who are injecting their personal lives,' said Ms Penelope Trunk, the author of the Brazen Careerist blog, who has written frequently in the past year about the collapse of her 15-year marriage.

Ms Trunk wrote about going to what she thought was their first marriage counselling session only to discover it was a divorce lawyer's office. That was one of her most popular posts.

More painfully, she has written about the problems of a son who has Asberger's syndrome and said that both she and her husband believed the challenges of raising him helped cause their divorce.