Daily Blague

Blogs on the front page of the Times! What will they think of next?

"A Call for Manners in the World of Nasty Blogs," by Brad Stone, directs readers to O'Reilly Radar, where Tim O'Reilly has proposed a code of conduct for blog owners that, among other things, carries their responsibility for what appears on their sites so far as to include comments. The lawyer in me found the code hopelessly vague and ad hoc, but that's precisely what good manners always are.

There's no ambiguity, however, about Article 3 of Mr O'Reilly's code. "We connect privately before we respond publicly." All well-brought-up people know that it's best to give someone whose behavior or appearance may be out of line a quiet word on the side. If you see a guy whose fly is open, you don't (if you're well-mannered) expostulate and point. You tap him on the shoulder and whisper. The fewer people who notice an error, the better. That's in the real world. It ought to be the same in the Blogosphere, but for some reason the very opposite idea seems to have taken root. The more people who notice an error, this thinking runs, the healthier the Internet will be. Pointing out typos and offering factual corrections in comments, however, doesn't so much improve the reliability of blogs as it discredits erring bloggers - to the extent that it doesn't poison the atmosphere with self-righteous aggression.

I had to laugh, though, at the bit about Six Apart diva Mena Trott, whose talk on civility at a Paris conference was disrupted by real-time responses to her speech that were posted on a screen. Ms Trott "lost it." What's ironic here is that Six Apart has refused to equip its MovableType software with meaningful defenses against noxious comment spam. That's why I'll be abandoning the platform at some point later this year.