Should Blogs Have a Seal of Approval?
April is the 10th anniversary of the blog, and there is no better indication of how contentious the medium has become than the growing number of calls by bloggers themselves to regulate it.
The current darlings of wannabe regulators are so-called codes of conduct, guidelines on what is and is not appropriate in online discussions and stuff like whether people are allowed to comment anonymously.
The issue has come to a head because of an epidemic of cyberbullying, mostly infamously including death threats and other forms of intimidation directed at Kathy Sierra, who blogs on high-tech issues and found herself in the crosshairs because of a dispute on whether inflammatory comments made on blogs should be deleted.
Leading the charge for codes of conduct is big-time blogger Tim O’Reilly, who perhaps not coincidentally is a PR man. O’Reilly has posted a draft of a sample code on his website and is soliciting comments.
Please click here to read more at my own blog.
opinions powered by SendLove.to
10 Responses to “Should Blogs Have a Seal of Approval?”
[...] Should Blogs Have a Seal of Approval? – The Moderate VoiceShould Blogs Have a Seal of Approval?The Moderate Voice – 59 minutes ago… mostly infamously including death threats and other forms of intimidation directed at Kathy Sierra, who blogs on high-tech issues and found herself in … [...]
[...] I wasn’t even going to comment on this whole ‘Blogger’s code of conduct’ nonsense, until I saw this, this morning. First of all it should be pointed out, as I have a few dozen times previously, that “The Moderate Voice” is nothing of the kind. [...]
Shaun: here’s my view. I have my own rules, if people break them comments are ruthlessly deleted and the person who left the comment in question banned. I do not need to sign up for any ‘code’ if I want to keep my blog ‘clean’. I think that Ed Morrissey worded it well that this is a plan born out of good intentions, but doomed to fail.
I haven’t heard that many bloggers calling to regulate the blogosphere, actually. Not political bloggers, anyway, and we’re the ones on the front lines of nastiness. I think most of us have been moderating comments on our blogs for a long time and don’t need some techie telling us how. I have a publicly posted comments policy that says, in effect, This is my blog and I will delete any comment I damn well please. And then I do it. A few times when I’ve been linked to by a hostile site like Little Green Footballs I shut down comments altogether until the attackers go away; usually they lose interest in two or three days.
I suspect that what happened to Kathy Sierra might not have happened had she taken the same steps from the beginning. Once the mob has taken over a blog it’s too late to boot them out.
Also, I do not think blogging is any more contentious now than it has been in the past. I’ve been blogging for five years, and I don’t notice any real difference. If anything the right-wing sites are a shade more subdued than they were two or three years ago. And compared to the Wild West era of Usenet, the blogosphere is relatively genteel.
maha:
I have been going online since 1993 and had some Usenet exposure. This may be an “in the eyes of the beholder thing,” but it is my view that the level of uncivility has increased expodentially with the explosion of the blogosphere, but then I would say the same thing about society in general.
In the end, I come down on this issue with Michael, who articulates my own view regarding my blog, Kiko’s House, which is figurately a house but like a real one is a place where people have to play by my rules: That means no putting their feet on the furniture, giving dinner scraps to the critters, leaving with their car keys if they’ve had a bit too much to drink . . .
I have found that the FBI is very helpful.
This is an exercise in what academics call ‘mental masturbation’. Your blog. You do with it what you want. People will come or go based on what you write, the tone you set, and the community that forms around you (assuming you even choose to allow comments, that is).
You want to link up with other bloggers who adhere to a certain common code of conduct? That’s fine. Have a good time. Heck, if enough people band together, you might actually have an impact on behavior. But don’t even for a second think that everyone should join your little thought-control club… That’s just silly.
I like mvdg’s way- spic n span-but hopefully he will give us a warning before banning commenters!
Bitsblog- I guess it depends on your definition of a moderate, but most regulars here find TMV to be exactly what it purports to be. Joe has posts from all sides of the political spectrum.
Idiosyncrat- Watch out. You’ll get accused of ad’n hominy, or something like that.