Wednesday, April 11, 2007
No Comment
Much has been written this past week about the Blogger's Code of Conduct drawn up by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Tim O'Reilly, particularly with regard to comments posted on blogs, in the wake of death threats made to American blogger Kathy Sierra. As one reader pointed out (in a commentary) a few weeks back, Underachievement is not laden down with comments, despite the fact that I have turned Comment Moderation off in the past couple of weeks to see if I would survive a prospective onslaught of spam commentary - and, remarkably, thus far I have. I am not sure why there are so few comments posted, perhaps it's because the blog is too wide-ranging to interest everybody all of the time (and there is no shortage of readers of day, regulars as well as casual ones) or maybe it is because I am not too pro-active myself when it comes to posting comments on other people's blogs. This may well be the main reason, and one can accept that you have to give as well as take. Either way I am not being sniffy about the lack of comments - Seanachie is not so precious a sort - and there have been those of you that have contacted me directly too, all of which is greatly appreciated. The Blogging Code of Conduct is probably not too applicable to such a modest enterprise as Underachievement but don't be afraid to leave a comment if you want to; I will read it as will others - I hope. Go nuts, kids.
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5 comments:
The blogger code of conduct has received a huge backlash from the blogosphere which just goes to show how people really feel about free speech. I for one am completely sympathetic with what happened to Kathy, it really was awful but I also am opposed to a code of conduct that would simply stifle the many wonderful blogs out there. You can't stop people reading or writing on the web, nor should you as long as it is legal. The law is there for a reason and a code of conduct is not required in addition.
While I agree with you about the law being sufficient in the case of malicious abuse, the Code of Conduct, as I understand it, is an innocuous enough document that it would be hard to imagine being used - at least in its present form - to stifle free speech. Most of the proposals are commonsensical and fair - such as the obligation to explain why comments are deleted. O'Reilly and Wales' proposals are best summarised in the line: 'We won't say anything online that we wouldn't say in person'. I don't know if there are any plans to enforce the Code but if it were done in a draconian way by any servers, well, we can always take our blogs elsewhere. I certainly would, though of course this blog does not suffer from a deluge of any sort of commentary. :)
Agreed that the document is relatively innocuous, I guess it is just the idea of a neighbourhood watch type system of site badging and other accoutrements that would possibly ensue in addition to people using the code to remove comments and hiding behind it that makes me a little wary of it. As you say though, there's always a new place to go if hosters and others implement this in a draconian fashion. Thanks for the reply.
I am more doing the post on my blog out of interest to see how many people would comment. Given enough time, if you left a post to 'ferment', so to speak, you would probably get a lot of comments on it.
And why the fuck does 'Jimbo' Wales, as he likes to be known, have a hand in drawing up the Blogger's Code of Conduct? Why do we even need one? Are we children that don't know how to behave ourselves?
Idiots.
I'm reminded of the Parental Advisors stickers that American Mom's led by Mrs Gore insisted should appear on Hip-Hop Albums. It quickly became a badge of honour, but in this case I think the code of conduct label on a site would be considered the opposite to that - a badge of dishonour.
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