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Bloggers' Code of Conduct

Ionut Alex. Chitu [PersonRank 10]

Tuesday, April 10, 2007
17 years ago2,594 views

Tim O'Reilly's silly code of conduct for bloggers (http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/04/draft_bloggers_1.html) generated a lot of buzz. I think this text doesn't deserve that much attention. It's completely uninteresting but here's techmeme's frontpage:
http://www.techmeme.com/070409/p7#a070409p7

Besides the ridiculous badges, the text has contradictions like:

<<We celebrate the blogosphere because it embraces frank and open conversation.>>

<<We do not allow anonymous comments.>>

<<When someone who is publishing comments or blog postings that are offensive, we'll tell them so (privately, if possible--see above) and ask them to publicly make amends.>>

Who defines what's offensive and since when bloggers are the moral police?

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Apparently Tim sees the need for such a code of conduct due to threatening comments made against blogger Kathy Sierra. But I think this code of conduct is over-generalizing and just going too far (and not just due to badges!). Every blogger can make up their own mind about just what they deem acceptable practices. For example here, per the rules we always remove comments that contain personal attacks against others, and I also snip longer texts if I spot a copyright infringement. But require an email for every poster, take all responsibility for what they say, always connect privately first (sorry, but sometimes a very public blog post is the only way to get some organization to respond, and sometimes back-alley chatter is less honest for blog readers), or remove comments that quote "misrepresent another person" (which is a very subjective judgment call to make)? On a side-note, there are forms of satire which should always allow exceptions (and whether or not something is satire too can be a subjective judgment call).

Related link – A Blogger’s Code:
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2006-01-12-n13.html
<<These are the first 15 points of the German press code which was presented in 1972; I just replaced “the press” with “bloggers”, “publication” with “blog” and so on.>>

/pd [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

"Every blogger can make up their own mind about just what they deem acceptable practices."

True..

Bloggers are human beings and we know what is right and wrong.. blogosphere is not a school library that needs to be controlled or the other best thing is that ..."everything goes"!!

Kevin [PersonRank 0]

17 years ago #

I think Nick Carr sums it up best:

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/04/thanks_tim_and.php

Regardless, I hope this knee jerk reactionary fervor fades quickly.

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