As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:
Tech writer and prominent blogger Kathy Sierra announced on Monday that she would be suspending her blog and cancelling her scheduled presentations at the ETech Conference because of online threats of violence made against her.
In a post to her blog, named Creating Passionate Users, Sierra said she had become too fearful to leave her house. During the past four weeks, she had been the target of abusive messages on two other blogs, as well as receiving death threats on her own blog, she explained.
Sierra included, in her account, screenshots of derogatory images and comments believed to have been made against her on the recently deleted blogs, meankids.org and unclebobism. Also included were the names of prominent bloggers that she believes to have been connected with the offending blogs.
Among those named was Chris Locke, also a prominent blogger and co-author of business titles Cluetrain Manifesto and Gonzo Marketing.
While he admits that he "does not like" Sierra, Locke claims no responsibility for the threats Sierra said she was receiving on her blog.
"If Kathy Sierra was receiving 'death threats' in anonymous comments to her blog, they did not come from me or, to the best of my knowledge, from anyone I know," he said.
Locke was a founding member of both meankids.org and unclebobism, which he said began as a bit of fun. In time, however, the community's sarcastic environment and objection to censorship lent itself to the appearance of what Locke said to be "some tasteless posts".
The site was taken down when Sierra's objections to posts on unclebobism came to light, Locke said.
"Evidently, there are some people who don't much like her [Sierra]," he said. "The same could be said of myself or indeed of anyone who blogs much. It comes with the territory."
"I will not take responsibility for what someone else said, nor will I censor what another individual wrote," he said. "However, it was clear that Sierra was upset, so it seemed the best course to make the whole [unclebobism] site go away."
"I think her response, as it pertains to anything I personally wrote, was unjustified -- but highly effective -- character assassination," Locke said. "As a result, I'm sure I'll be explaining for years to come that I'm not really an axe murderer and child molester."
Another blogger whom Sierra accused in her post goes by the alias 'Joey', and asked for his full name not to be revealed.
Joey has been alleged to have posted death threats in a post that made reference to an image in which Sierra's face appeared beside a hangman's noose.
In a statement that was emailed to Computerworld Australia, Joey claimed having no intention of threatening Sierra, and that his comment was made in jest and targeted not at Sierra, but at Locke's fictional character, Kat Herding.
While he said that some misunderstanding is understandable, Joey also accused Sierra of having frequented the unclebobism site even before the objectionable posts appeared, and should have known what to expect from the site.
"I have nothing but sympathy for the experience Kathy receives in her personal email or blog comments. No one deserves that sort of treatment," he said. "That said, nasty emails should be no shock to anyone in the public arena. That doesn't make them right; it simply makes a shocked reaction to them incredible."
According to Donna Benjamin, a member of the Open Source group AussieChix, the issue goes further than whether or not any physical harm was intended on Sierra. So far, a torrent of emails has flowed from the group's mailing list in support of Sierra, who appeared as a keynote presenter at linux.conf.au in Sydney this year.
"There is some debate about whether or not Kathy was actually under any physical kind of threat, but that's not the point. As Kathy herself points out - it's the idea of the threat that does harm," she said.
"It is precisely this kind of culture and language that serves to alienate people, particularly women, from online communities and interactions," Benjamin said.
Meanwhile, the blogosphere is in uproar.
In a recent blog post, Microsoft technical evangelist Robert Scoble mused that the Internet culture needed "fixing".
"It's this culture of attacking women that has especially got to stop," he wrote. "Whenever I post a video of a female technologist there invariably are snide remarks about body parts and other things that simply wouldn't happen if the interviewee were a man."
In solidarity with Sierra, and out of concern for previous attacks that targeted himself and his wife on meankids.org, Scoble has elected to suspend his blog for one week.
In an interview with Computerworld Australia, Scoble attributed the increased attacks on bloggers to the growing popularity of the online journalism medium.
"Bloggers are now celebrities -- not on the same scale as Paris Hilton, but amongst geek and developer groups lots of people know us," he said. "Some feel that makes us open season for attacks."
In the meantime, Sierra's silence on Creating Passionate Users is attracting even more attention to the blog. Her latest blog posting in which the situation was described has now attracted almost 1,000 comments from supporters and critics - which is easily twenty times the reader response her blog usually receives.
Unsuccessful attempts were made to contact Sierra for her comment on this story.
