I’ve just setup a Pledgebank here to encourage Kathy Sierra to start blogging again. For anyone who doesn’t know the story of what happened, you can read her statement and probably find traces of the original post somewhere in the wayback machine but basically some wacko made graphic death threats and scared her enough that she stopped writing. This thoroughly sucks because not only did her writing have huge educational value and daily insights for people making software, but it had massive inspirational value as well. The essence of her mantra “help your users kick ass” absolutely changed the way I look at how we build our stuff.

Kathy’s last post to Creating Passionate Users was a call for ideas on how she could resume her writing while avoiding a traumatizing situation like that one from recurring. At least half the value of her blog was the conversation that spawned the comments of her posts. I propose a member-only community site where yearly membership dues paid to Kathy gets one a year’s-worth of access to her writing and the ability to interact with other readers. I’m willing to set up this private site and pay the fee if we can get 200 other people to commit to joining. If you’re interested in this, sign the pledge here and spread the word. It sucks that those threats occurred Kathy but the software world misses your voice. RSS readers everywhere have a serious void. Please come back.

Expiration for the pledgebank is set for New Year’s ’08.

UPDATE: put this image on your blog if you want to help recruit: