Online Code of Conduct
p2pnet.net news:- In the early days of surfing, ‘netiquette’ was a Big Deal and of great concern, especially to newbies logging on for the first time. After all, no one wanted to be flamed! But that could happen if you didn’t watch what you were saying, and to whom you were saying it.
Nowadays, it’s hardly ever mentioned and some people deliberately troll for trouble with inflammatory posts.
However, if Net publisher Tim O’Reilly and the Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales have they’re way, everyone will be on their best behaviour when they’re online,.
They’re among “a few high-profile figures in high-tech” proposing a “blogger code of conduct to clean up the quality of online discourse,” says The New York Times.
Part of their stems from the plight of Kathy Sierra who runs Creating Passionate Users.
“As I type this, I am supposed to be in San Diego, delivering a workshop at the ETech conference,” she posted recently. “But I’m not. I’m at home, with the doors locked, terrified. 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… blogs authored and/or owned by a group that includes prominent bloggers. People you’ve probably heard of. People like respected Cluetrain Manifesto co-author Chris Locke (aka Rageboy).”
Pointing out that Sierra is a friend, but that he wasn’t aware in advance, “of her decision to go public with her story,” on his O’Reilly Radar, O’Reilly has what amounts to a Code of Conduct.’
The headings, under each of which are breakdowns of subject matter, are:
- Take responsibility not just for your own words, but for the comments you allow on your blog.
- Label your tolerance level for abusive comments..
- Consider eliminating anonymous comments.
- Ignore the trolls.
- Take the conversation offline, and talk directly, or find an intermediary who can do so.
- If you know someone who is behaving badly, tell them so.
- Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t say in person.
Wales has one more offering than O’Reilly and declares, “We present this Blogger Code of Conduct in hopes that it helps create a culture that encourages both personal expression and constructive conversation. One can disagree without being disagreeable.”
And his last thought suggests we, “get over ourselves in thinking that this whole blogging nonsense is at all important”.
Meanwhile, his suggestions are:
- We take responsibility for our own words and reserve the right to restrict comments on our blog that do not conform to basic civility standards.
- We won’t say anything online that we wouldn’t say in person.
- If tensions escalate, we will connect privately before we respond publicly.
- When we believe someone is unfairly attacking another, we take action.
- We do not allow anonymous comments.
- We ignore the trolls.
- We encourage blog hosts to enforce more vigorously their terms of service.
At the end of his post, “as Doc Searls famously said in The Cluetrain Manifesto, the book he co-authored with Chris Locke and David Weinberger, ‘markets are conversations’,” O’Reilly sums things up.
“We celebrate the blogosphere because it embraces frank and open conversation in ways that were long missing from mainstream media and marketing-dominated corporate websites. But frankness does not have to mean lack of civility. There’s no reason why we should tolerate conversations online that we wouldn’t tolerate in our living room.
“A culture is a set of shared agreements that allows us to live together. Let’s make sure that the culture we create with our blogs is one that we are proud of.”
Also See:
The New York Times – WA Call for Manners in the World of Nasty Blogs, April 9, 2007
plight of Kathy Sierra – Death Threats vs Freedom of Speech, March 30, 2007
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at thIs the end (of the Net) nigh?zze University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
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Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local politicians. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance. Don’t just complain. Do something!
April 10th, 2007 at 8:50 am
http://blog.topix.net/archives/000106.html
Looks like you have lots of time to spare given that you want to register as yourself on all those blogs and forums, given that the IDs on the blogosphere cannot be reused on multiple sites without re-registering it.
Unless you pay people to register with their true names, all registrations are pseudonymous, with all the trolling and flames that result from such registrations. Anonymity counters vanity.
Those who are the experts in their fields are typically busy, and they don’t register. Sites implementing registration filter out people who would be otherwise valuable.
New York TImes: “We have X million online readers”
Jane Doe, 90 years old, Afghanistan: “I am six of them”