I am shocked at the venom and death threats against Kathy Sierra - it is sick, mean, even anarchical and evil, totally unethical. My first reaction was disgust and dismay and I have the greatest sympathy for what she is going through - but I find myself as appalled at the knee-jerk reaction of hate going around about a set of people implicated in her post - its not doing much good I'm afraid. Truly *Evil* minds whoever they are in this case, feed on such things.

I feel Mitch Ratcliffe's post is a really balanced take on the whole thing, especially this from Mitch - "We are further from that moment of truth now, however, because the silence of mock outrage reigns."

There are many conflicting thoughts in me right nowaround this issue. The woman in me is enraged at what Kathy is goingthrough - and yet am not sure its a 'woman' thing at all. Lots of theAmerican blogworld , esp at the A-list level, is fairly obsessed by howfew women are really respected in Tech - this is evident by the endlessdebates on inviting women speakers at conferences. And yet, apart from BlogHer Idon't see much happening to change this, as I see the same set of women speaking over and over again. The outrage against what'shappened to her, is possibly greater because Kathy happens to be awoman. Are we perpetuating this gender divide by making it a womanthing - am not sure.

As a blogger, and one who has been around since 2003 this sort of stuff has been around. [link via Doc Searls]. Hateis just simply bad. Cyber bullying is bad. That's what we needto address. Whether against victim or accused (note here - I make adistinction between accused and convicted). Whether its against anA-lister or a Z-lister. Whether against man or woman. Its areflection of a society gone badly wrong. Only the social systemwithin which it exists can correct itself. In this case, blogs. Blogsand bloggers often reflect mob-like mentalities - some call it the echochamber - and while there are many positive aspects of this - we mustguard against the negatives.

I've had all sorts of threats and quite a bit of hate mail - I found the best thing is to simply ignore it and it usually goes away. I'm glad Kathy brought it out in the open though, its an issue that needs to be debated and addressed - and still I wish she hadn't made those really serious and clear accusations against specific individuals until after all the investigations by the authorities were done. Blogs are so powerful and the internet is an unforgiving place - entire reputations can be ruined thus.

We had an incident, not half as offensive as this, but the fallout was pretty severe, in the Indian Blogosphere - where a guy who was plagiarizing content from blogs was really beaten up by Indian bloggers - and I got tons of really bad hate mail for calling it Mob Justice and a witch hunt - although I will say this once more, that I would never condone plagiarism. - check the comments out there - these are only those that I let through. There were tons of mail and other comments that crossed my line of acceptability and were really lewd, hateful and full of threats. I ignored them and deleted them. And they went away.

Censorship and more regulation is not the answer - has it ever really worked where the internet is concerned? Andy Carvin has called for aStop Cyberbullying Day. That's the sort of action that makes sense.