Peoria Pundit

Blogger Katherine Cobel got a rude visitor the other day:

The doorbell rang 5 minutes ago.It was delivery of a certified letter.

I am being ordered to take down all of my blog entries pertaining to JL Kirk & Associates. If I don’t, they will so me for tortuous interference and other damages.

Apparently this headhunter company did something to tick her off and she’s been writing about them. Which is what happens in the digital age. It used to be when some company did you dirt, you could only quit doing business with them and tell your friends about it, and then your friends would tell their friends and maybe word would get out and cost them some business. These days, a blogger who gets POed can tell thousands if not millions of people, some of whom have their own blogs.

Look at Jeff Jarvis and his Dell Hell posts. No doubt Dell would have done anything to shut Jarvis up, but in the end, they had to deal with reality and address problems with their technical support efforts, and are a better company because of it.

Sadly, there are chicken-hearted ISPs who will cut off service to a customer the instant anyone threatens legal action. But there are other ISPs. As long as a blogger maintains a backup, any blog can be moved elsewhere. This blogger particular used wordpress.com, which isn’t going to cut and run.

All these clowns did was guarantee that more people would see her original post about JL Kirk, not to mention her subsequent posts about JL Kirk. All these guys are doing by using bully tactics is to encourage other bloggers to spread the word.

The genie is out of the bottle, friends. If JL Kirk wants to shut her up, take her to court and be done with it. But don’t think for a moment that JL Kirk isn’t going to take a hit.

UPDATE: Welcome to the wonderful world of googlebombing.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 12th, 2007 at 10:06 am and is filed under Citizen Journalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.