A tech blogger canceled public appearances after getting violent posts, a hazard of the wild Web. Kathy Sierra’s blog, Creating Passionate Users, is filled with musings on software design. Not the kind of thing you’d expect to draw death threats.

But cyber-bullies posted such vicious remarks about her on the Internet that she canceled her keynote speech at a technology conference in San Diego this week, afraid to leave her home in Boulder, Colo. “I will never be the same,” she wrote, then said she had suspended her blogging.

The threats and vivid sexual taunts aimed at Sierra — and the subsequent uproar — exposed a creepy reality: Cyber-bullies, often emboldened by anonymity, target bloggers who write about even the most innocuous subjects.

Read it here: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-internet31mar31,0,4064392.story?coll=la-home-business