Blogger Kathy Sierra of Creating Passionate Users has protested that Death threats against bloggers are NOT "protected speech" (why I cancelled my ETech presentations). And, in fact, she's been subjected to extremely nasty abuse on other sites.
Frank Paynter (who didn't make the threatening posts) has apologised and taken the offending sites down.
Robert Scoble has stopped blogging for a week in protest. "The Internet culture is really disgusting," he writes.
Sure, we knew that already. We knew it from Usenet, even before the great tide of everyday inhumanity hit the web. However, now there's a debate, so people will at least think about what, if anything, can be done....
Update: Jemima Kiss has posted Blogs gone bad: the misogyny of web abuse over at out OrganGrinder blog.
Kevin Anderson has also alerted me to the fact that Chris "Rageboy" Locke has outlined his (non) involvement in the case in re Kathy Sierra's allegations. He says:
First off, I need to preface this by emphasizing that 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. That she would make such an inference based on no evidence whatsoever is outrageous, no better than the comments she so forcefully objects to that were made about herself. And *none* of the statements or graphics she quotes were made by me, as I'm fairly certain she already knows. However, as a co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto -- which she explicitly refers to twice -- I guess my relatively high profile suited her purposes better than the truth.
He concludes:
I did write two comments on the "Bob's Yer Uncle" site, which I am happy to repeat for the record: 1) "Kathy Sierra is a hopeless dipshit."; and 2) "The only 'passionate users' I know are crack heads." I do not like Kathy Sierra. I like her even less after her post of Monday. If she is waiting for me to apologize for something I did or said, she is going to have a very long wait.
I've interviewed Chris Locke in The Guardian (Rebel without a pause), and had dinner with him. We've emailed each other over the years. He is, I think, one of the good guys. Death threats are not his style...
