Who is "Ismail Ax?"

The American blogosphere logged a tragic milestone on Monday with the Virginia Tech massacre that claimed 33 lives.

Eighty or so hours after this incident, there have already been thousands of blogs written about this national tragedy (as of this posting, 8,687 blogs have been written under the heading of Virginia Tech, according to Technorati.com).

One of the more intriguing threads was the speculation of the meaning behind the name "Ismail Ax," which was found scrawled in red ink on the arm of Seung-Hui Cho. The name was also the alias Cho used on the postage when he sent his manifesto and video to NBC.

Some thought it might be a reference to the Islamic account of the Biblical sacrifice of Abraham. It seems that the Islamic connection was a popular theory in the blogosphere because many people believed the incident to be related to terrorism.

But in Cho's 1800-word manifesto and video, he ranted incoherently against wealth and debauchery, never citing any scripture, simply referencing Jesus Christ and martyrdom. He was organized, but seemed to lack the discipline and focus of a jihadist. Cho's motivations appear to be intensely narcissistic, and self-absorption goes against everything Islam is about. So it seems highly dubious that Cho did this in conjunction with any terrorist network.

Another, more obscure theory is that the name is a reference to the outlaw warrior character Ishmael Bush from the James Fenimore Cooper novel "The Prairie." The character is supposed to symbolize the darkest evil in man. Or some think it might possibly be the character Ishmael from "Moby Dick," since Cho was an English major and had likely read the book.

Others think that Cho used the name simply because it was the nickname he had adopted on a video-gaming site.

In a cynical sign of our tech-savvy times, Raymond Patterson of Corpus Christi, Texas registered the domain name ismailax.com five minutes after he heard it mentioned on a Fox News broadcast. Patterson says he has about 200 domain names registered overall. How somebody could be thinking about business while hearing details of a massacre is beyond me.

But Patterson said he had no intention of making "blood money" off the site. Fortunately, he appears to have lived up to that promise, and the domain has since been used to direct people to a memorial site for the Virginia Tech victims.

Regardless of the name's meaning - if there really is any - there's no way we'll ever truly know what compelled Cho to do what he did. But as journalists - and humans - we will always be striving to answer the unanswerable.