According to an article in the New York Times Jimmy Wales and others are tired of incivility in blogs. They are working to make the Internet a more civil and nicer place to live. See the article at "A Call for Manners in the World of Nasty Blogs" in the New York Times Technology section (free registration required).
Last week, Tim O’Reilly, a conference promoter and book publisher who is credited with coining the term Web 2.0, began working with Jimmy Wales, creator of the communal online encyclopedia Wikipedia, to create a set of guidelines to shape online discussion and debate.Chief among the recommendations is that bloggers consider banning anonymous comments left by visitors to their pages and be able to delete threatening or libelous comments without facing cries of censorship.
Curb your blogo-tongue
O'Reilly's original post is on O'Reilly Radar, where he floated a tentative "Blogger's Code of Conduct." This triggered the Times story and the involvement of Jimmy Wales on Blogging Wikia.
Today, Jonathan Freedland of The Guardian, has a blog post that continues the discussion. He asks whether people would tolerate the same level of hostility in public forums (I guess he hasn't watched the Parliament on CSPAN lately? Who really knows what those backbenchers are backchatting about?), and mentions a range of issues concerning gender, anonymity, and online user identities that will be quite familiar to those in the computers and writing community.
Freedland mentions possible solutions, such as a single online identity, or a proposal by Neil Levine to create "comment credits"--something like digg for blog comments or the "x of x people found the following review helpful" function on amazon?
For oldtime Usenet newsgroup users, the conversation won't seem new (ignore trolls, limit anonymous commenting, signal your preference against flaming, etc.). But for those teaching blog courses, this conversation could be interesting for students to listen in on--and participate in. The emergence of such self governing codes in Wikipedia and elsewhere on the internet could figure into students' investigations.