Every week or so, I Google the word "Jihad", just to see what the loonies have been up to. This week, it brought me the story of Jeremy Raynalds, a witer for American Daily, a conservative website.

A radical Islamic web site containing a death threat against me (http://haganah.org.il/harchives/003608.html) remains on line at its Chicago based Internet service provider – at least for now.

In a Friday phone call from Alex Korneyev, the owner of Host for Web (www.hostforweb.com), I understood him to say the site will be taken off line shortly. In a follow-up e-mail Korneyev said the reason the site has remained available is "because we were working with ... law enforcement agencies."

However, in the same e-mail Korneyev emphasized, "I did not say that it was FBI that requested the site to be left running."

A woman answering the telephone at the Chicago FBI on Saturday said there were no agents available. When I requested that she contact an agent, she said that someone would contact me Saturday. Despite that statement the call was not immediately returned.

The death threat's posting has caused an outpouring of concern because of the radical nature of those who post to the bulletin board section of the Al-Ansar site.

All of us here in the blogosphere have the potential to attract the same kind of unwelcome attention. Some of us, myself included, choose to write under pseudonyms in order to protect our identities. I know I haven't cloaked myself perfectly, and that if some jihadist decided he wanted to kill me, he could easily do so. It won't stop any of us from speaking out. I think it will just keep us on our guard a bit better than most.

So at the risk of sounding like an afterschool special, remember kiddies, the internet can be dangerous. If strange things (crank phonecalls, weird mail, etc) start happening, don't ignore it. Everyday I - and others like me - slam the sh*t out of some of the most dangerous people on earth, without benefit of any type of protection. When bloggers solicit funds to increase bandwidth, do they think to also use some of that cash to install an alarm system at home? After all, it might just be a viable blog-related expense.

I might sound a bit paranoid, but I'm just being careful. And I hope you are too. I'd hate to lose a blogger or a reader to a bullet.