Owing to the recent death threats given against a prominent female programmer, games developer and blogger Kathy Sierra, the blogging community including the high profile web expert Tim O’Reilly are asking for a Bloggers’ code of conduct.
Kathy Sierra has spoken on her fears in her blog. She was forced to come to a decision of canceling her public appearance. She got so terrorized to attend O’Reilly ETech conference in San Diego. She cited:
There is an unwritten rule in the blogoshpere that it is wrong to delete nasty comments. It suggests that you can’t take criticism but now there is a sense that this is nonsense. Despite my fortunately good experiences, I do think it’s harder in some ways for women to blog.
Do we really need it?
Well, it somehow looks a great idea to have code of conduct for bloggers at the first instance but if we take a deeper look, I don’t think this idea could do any wonders.
A Bloggers’ code of conduct will just add to the ever-growing problems with the blogoshpere. For now, the blogoshpere is free for all where everyone can say whatsoever he or she wants to. But, this new code will set some ‘rules’ as to what is acceptable and what is not. Moreover, Comments are a straight-forward likeness of a commentator’s opinion and I think that deleting a comment is a poor form similar to deleting a post.
Even if this code of conduct is given green signal, I doubt that all the bloggers will adhere to the new rules. After all, you can’t enforce the things on the web. Blogs offer citizens the truest freedom of the press and they have the ability to create a buzz. For me, putting any restrictions on the free nature of blogs will be like restricting human freedom of expression.
Such incidents have happened earlier and are bound to happen in future too no matter there is any code of conduct or not. In Seirra’s case, there is even no proof that the commenting people were bloggers in actual. We have to accept the hard fact that the people who make such threats are not going to stick to a blogging code of conduct.
Personally, I think that it would be mere idiocy to think of a code of conduct for bloggers. In any case, if the code of conduct is formulated, it would encourage the bloggers-hostile governments (read here and here) to maltreat the bloggers and this will eventually result in another setback to citizen journalism.
