You want a good laugh?
By Moe Lane Posted in Blogosphere — Comments (9) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Update: I'm bumping this to bring to attention both Daniel Henninger's article on the subject and Captain Ed's response to it. Ed, being a better blogger than I am, sums it all up quite nicely: "The bloggers causing the problem wouldn't sign onto the speech codes, and the ones that would don't cause the problem."
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You want a good laugh?
Check out O'Reilley Radar's call for a blogger's code of conduct (via Glenn). Don't get me wrong: I think that it'd be wonderful. Then again, so would having an embassy from the Galactic Federation show up with a working FTL drive and really good antiagathics.
Lemme explain how this goes:
1). An initiative proposing a civil comments policy is proposed.
2). People (mostly those unaffected by a civil comments policy) sign on.
3). A critical mass of blogging 'big dogs' (most of whom would be affected by a civil comments policy, and that adversely) do not.
4). Gresham's Law manifests itself and reaps a bloody harvest.
See also: Online Integrity. It didn't, ah, take. And, honestly? As long as one half of the political blogosphere is a distributed network of ad hoc alliances while the other half is a ideologically homogenized and centralized cartel... it never will. Jeebus, half the fun for some of those sites are the Three-Minute Hates they sponsor. Not to my taste, but it's a big 'sphere out there.
You should research - and I'm not being snarky about this - Online Integrity, which was a previous servious attempt along these lines, and which blew up pretty much precisely as I set it out above.
The Fuzzy Puppy of the VRWC.
anyway, those that don't, won't give a flip, because they know there is some guy in the neighborhood with a whole trunk full of guns cheap.
How would you enforce this? It seems less enforcable than The Volstead Act.
"...and each wasted evening is
a gross violation against the
natural course of your only life;"
-Charles Buckowski
Scott Ott is a genius.
Genteel Blogs Offer 'Civility Offsets' to Vitriolic Bloggers
by Scott Ott(2007-04-09) — A draft proposal circulating in the so-called blogosphere would allow family-friendly blogs to sell “civility offsets” to vitriolic bloggers who prefer to pay for “nastiness indulgences” rather than to tame their bitter tirades.
Advocates say that unlike a proposed “blogger code of conduct,” the new civility offsets will not slash the number of blatant death threats or reduce comparisons between President George Bush and the common chimpanzee, but they may reduce the momentary twinges of guilt experienced by some vicious, vindictive and vitriolic bloggers.
ScrappleFace.com, the family-friendly daily news satire site, has already become a kind of clearing house for civility offsets, by allowing readers to make donations through PayPal.com “to assuage the guilt brought on by indelicate words posted on blogs like The Huffington Post and The Daily Kos,” according to ScrappleFace editor Scott Ott.
Those who you're worried about getting guns, ain't gonna be affected by the new laws anyway, because they ain't gettin' 'em legally in the first place.
As trevino said when I trotted out my own sad, futile attempt at a Code of Ethics, them that needs one won't take one, them that takes one won't need it. Well, that's not a direct quote, since what he really said was that almost all of the conservatives he asked said yes, but almost all of the liberals thought it was some kind of Jedi mind trick.
The weakest part of that O'Reilly silliness is that its scope is so narrow. It's as if this is the first inkling they had that bloggers had some sort of ethical question, and here come the Open Source Marines to the rescue.
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See the Academy