As in, seems neither of you have dug into this enough to separate out what’s actually transpired here and, until you do, this discussion is purely academic. (as are most of the others I’ve seen today)

The posts on the 2 sites in question did indeed veer into the tasteless and, yes, just plain inappropriate.

The actual death threats Sierra received however, were from posters to her own site. While she does make this distinction on her own blog, she nonetheless also rather deftly, tries to weave them into the same sweater and, for that, I’ve lost much respect for her.

To say the least, making these separate things
“coonected by dots” so to speak, is subverting any reasonable effort to accomplish anything productive and not just here but across the blogoshpere at large.

Can we please get our stories straight before continuing this firestorm?

Have either of you read the posts and seen the pictures from the(now non-existent) two sites in question? Have you seen the “deleted” threat comments from Sierra’s site? (other than the chunklets she chose to disclose herself)?

Yes, clearly there was some wrongdoing against Ms. Sierra. I’ve now wasted the better part of two days readin’ all about it damn near everywhere it seems.

But, like Momma always tried to instill in us, Two (or, in this case more!) wrongs ain’t'a never gonna make a right.

Any sort of rational discourse cannot and will not occur until some cogent sorting of the facts is presented at large. We’ve seen damned little of that today.

I personally find it a damn shame that so many electrons have been wasted on this in this fashion. We’ve all done our self-righteous
venting and can now blitherly go our respective “merry ways”.

We’ve “sounded off” while tipping the brims of our white Stetsons and are are now running off in quest of the next “big thing” that will also require our cursory/momentary/self-righteous and indignat attentions.

And 48 hours from now, nothing will have changed because of it. Our attention will by then, be elsewhere.

ooh, wow! Big surprise.

Too many blogs…not enough common sense between ‘em to actually accomplish a damn thing.Oh, but have now all done our part, haven’t we?

yeah right.

The one thing we can’t have is further degradation in the conversational aspects of blogging. Without conversation, what’s the point?

I think services that secure and vet our identities have tremendous value; and plan on blogging about them in support of this issue.

Second – I’m with Niall in thinking that this is the kind of situation where the need for (for example) Kim Cameron’s work on identity is amply demonstrated. Like you, I leave a fairly clear trail as I move about the web. But there are two issues with doing that: one is what Niall refers to – it looks obvious who I am, but what confidence can you place in that? Second issue is (assuming this IS me, of course ) how much do I expose myself to the sort of attack Kathy Sierra has been subjected to? I think a large part of the promise of identity management as espoused by Kim Cameron and plenty of others is to provide YOU with confidence about who I am, and ME with a way to give you that confidence without having to expose more personal information than is absolutely necessary.

I’m not talking about a certified and bulletproof system, I am suggesting a cultural shift to precede anything technical. The first step in diminishing the prevalence of anonymity is for people to make a conscious choice to not be anonymous. I’ll settle on the honor system to achieve that.

I think the issues of anonymity and identity are two different ones. I agree that anonymity (or pseudonymity) is a problem, but how do I verify that the Jeff Nolan who comments on my blog, enters your email address and links to your blog, is actually you?