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."

Meanwhile, 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 to comment on this story.