Nobody is safe from the cameras now; not even the paparazzi. Joseph Gordon_Levitt fights fire with fire!

The speed of publication through blogging is both its strength and its weakness. The Kathy Sierra story [see previous post] is an excellent example of this.

• The Strength: It allows many more people to enter the conversation and work on getting to the route of the story. So in this case you can be sure that I will be able to get a much fuller and accurate picture of the truth than I would in a newspaper.
• The Weakness: I only get that full story if I read as much as I can from as many sources as I can. A single post will tend to be very biased and likely inaccurate.

It will be interesting to see what stories end up with the highest rankings at the end of the Kathy Sierra coverage. If it is a biased and angry post, then that will be a bad sign. If it is well researched reactions like Jim Turner’s post, then that’s a very good sign. I’m optimistic that the better quality posts will rank to the top, but I suspect search result #1 will be Kathy Sierra’s original post. If that’s the page people will read, I sure hope it gets updated.

I’m not going to attempt to follow the story closely on this blog as the greater insight will probably come only after this has died down.

One question I am actively seeking an answer to is whether it is a good idea to respond actively to a story, or to wait until there is less emotion before even trying to think of solutions. I lean heavily towards waiting since knee-jerk reactions are often the result of making decisions based on strong emotions. My original leaning towards fast reactions being a good thing, is that more people will actively seek to improve the state of affairs. However, that’s a misconceived notion since the risk of pushing an idea which would not succeed on its own merits is very high. Democracy works precisely because of this inefficiency in getting things changed. However, the free market works by allowing mistakes to happen and then fail. So the answer is certainly not simple.

For now may I encourage everyone to read Code v2 by Lawrence Lessig (available as a free download or in traditional published form). This provides an insightful argument to the possible course the Internet will take in order to govern itself. It is highly relevant to this story.

I also encourage everyone to read this post by Stephanie Booth… ‘Disturbed About Reactions to Kathy Sierra’s Post‘

Kathy Sierra writes:

As I type this, I am supposed to be in San Diego, delivering a workshop at the ETech conference. But I’m not. I’m at home, with the doors locked, terrified. For the last four weeks, I’ve been getting death threat comments on this blog. But that’s not what pushed me over the edge. What finally did it was some disturbing threats of violence and sex posted on two other blogs… blogs authored and/or owned by a group that includes prominent bloggers. People you’ve probably heard of.

The rest of the post is frankly disturbing.

I’m a little concerned over accuracy of information when names are flung around before a police investigation. And I really do hope there is a full police investigation.

Read Kathy Sierra’s post here.

It will be interesting to see how the blogging community handles this.

Will it become a big story?

Will it be resolved?

This is a test of the journalistic powers of said community. Some of the initial reaction can be found on Technorati. Most are of support, some people are angry.

In my opinion, the best thing we can do now is grow the story.

EDIT (29th March 2007 23:30 GMT):

Follow up post here.

I didn’t see this one coming:

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