While taking a qucik glance at news headlines at the MSNBC site, I stopped to click through on one that read:

“Cat Bin Lady’s” Internet infamy grows

In case you missed it, this is the tale of UK resident Mary Bale, who gained notoriety after a video showing her dumping a cat in a garbage bin was posted online. Facebook groups have formed calling for a prison sentence. She has received death threats. Parody videos have appeared, including one in which someone wearing a Sylvester (of Warner Brothers cartoon fame) costume dumps a woman wearing a grey wig into a bin. The Sun developed a video game for its site that lets users slam a garbage bin lid on Bale every time her head pops out of the trash.

Ample content has been produced about Bale, her action and the firestorm it has unleashed. Less has been said about the idea that a story like that that once might have remained contained to the Net will now invariably cross online boundaries and reach people who aren’t spending time online. Is there another kind of infamy these days besides “Internet infamy?”

The headline strikes me as one that would have made sense five or 10 years ago. “It’s not a real scandal,” I used to hear people say, “it’s just the echo chamber on the Net.”

Today, though, the Net and other media through which scandals propagate have been so thoroughly mashed together that it doesn’t matter where one begins; it’ll spread through the Net, drawing even more attention from mainstream media and building into an avalanche. This is the consequence of an undeniable critical mass that has been reached online, evidenced by (among other things) half a billion active Facebook accounts.

In Bale’s case, it was 4chan that got the ball rolling. 4chan is an image-based bulletin board where anyone can post an image (or a video) and others can comment on it. According to a Gawker article, the video started out on YouTube where it “went viral” (I wsh there was a quantitative criterion for what that means) before it appeared on 4chan. It took readers only about four hours to identify Bale, leading to all manner of harrassment finally driving Bale into hiding.

There are points to be made here about privacy, as well. The video, captured by a family’s closed circuit TV camera used for security purposes at a nearby house, shows Bale on a quiet residential street, where most of us would presume, in the absence of a Google street view van, that we weren’t being recorded. And Bale was no doubt shocked to have been identified in less time than most police departments need to track down a suspect. Even her employer’s name and phone number were made public. As former Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy so famously pointed out more than a decade ago, “Privacy is dead; get over it.”

But the point here is that you can no longer relegate scandal or infamy to the Net. If it rises to the level of the scandal or infamy, then it’s everywhere. If you doubt it, check out the 500-plus mainstream news articles covering the story. From an organizational standpoint, shrugging off an online scandal could cost you precious time you could be spending communicating in order to protect your reputation.