April 10, 2007 9:13AM  |
Some of the rules in the new Blogger’s Code of Conduct — proposed by Tim O’Reilly, a technology publisher, and Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia — include banning anonymous comments, taking responsibility for abusive blog postings, pointing out when blog visitors are acting badly, and not saying anything on blogs that you wouldn’t say in person.
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 Is it time for bloggers to enforce manners? Two influential Web pioneers think so. Tim O’Reilly, a technology publisher and Internet conference organizer, and Jimmy Wales, founder of the people-powered Wikipedia online encyclopedia, have proposed a voluntary Blogger’s Code of Conduct.Blogs subscribing to this set of guidelines might have a “Civility Enforced” logo on their site, and would make clear their intention to remove libelous comments. Other, more unrestrained blogs might have an “Anything Goes” logo, and permit the kind of anonymous, sometimes abusive comments that can populate Web discussions. Death Threats O’Reilly, who helped coin the “Web 2.0” term that encompasses user-generated discourse, said he was motivated by a series of death threats that his friend, tech blogger Kathy Sierra, received on her site. Sierra, a former game developer and co-author of a series of Web books published by O’Reilly Media, wrote a popular Web site titled Creating Passionate Users. Following a dispute on her site about whether visitors’ abusive comments could be deleted, she received death threats on her blog. The threats, including a posted photo of her next to a noose, were reported to the police. “I’m at home, with the doors locked, terrified,” she wrote on her blog. “For the last four weeks, I’ve been getting death threat comments on this blog. But that’s not what pushed me over the edge. What finally did it was some disturbing threats of violence and sex posted on two other blogs….” “As for the future of this blog,” she wrote recently, ” I know I cannot just return to business as usual — whatever absurd reasons have led to this much hatred for me (and for what I write here) will continue, so there is no reason to think the same things wouldn’t happen again….”
O’Reilly and Wales said that their proposed Code is based on Community Guidelines for a women’s blogging network called BlogHer. Some of the suggested rules include banning anonymous comments, taking responsibility for abusive postings, pointing out when visitors are acting badly, trying to move tension-filled dialogue offline, and not saying anything online that you wouldn’t say in person. “This is a really a Publisher’s Code of Conduct,” noted David Card, an analyst with Jupiter Research. “It may or may not have an effect on the conduct of people who post comments.” Some bloggers have protested that any kind of rules, even voluntary ones, sound like attempts to suppress free speech. “I’m not suggesting that every blog will want to delete such comments,” O’Reilly wrote in his blog, “but I am suggesting that blogs that do want to keep the level of dialogue at a higher level not be censured for doing so.” “There are many real-world analogies,” he continued. “Shock radio hosts encourage abusive callers; a mainstream talk radio show like NPR’s Talk of the Nation wouldn’t hesitate to cut someone off who started spewing hatred and abuse. Frat parties might encourage drunken lewdness, but a party at a tech conference would not.” |
