Hummingbird Mentality

Paul Walch of Segala, asks ‘Do we want a code for blogs?’

This question has arisen due to the Kathy Sierra controversy, the case of the online harassment of an O’Reily writer by an anonymous group of commenters, at a blog created specifically for uncensored criticism. Very quickly the ‘blogosphere’ divided into two camps, those who repudiated the hate speech directed at Sierra, but considered it a cost of the freedom of speech that blogging affords. And those, like tech writer and Web2.0 pioneer Tim O’Reilly, who believed a response was needed (beyond the specific legal retaliation sought against the perpetrators). O’Reilly’s proposal was a code of conduct for bloggers. Here’s the wiki for the code under development.

What follows is my response to Paul’s question, both in terms of the idea of a bloggers code of conduct, and the specific code O’Reilly proposes.

In short

Absolutely not, as Glen Farrelly points out, ‘good’ bloggers will follow their own individual codes regarding what they perceive as responsible behavior, ‘bad’ or ‘irresponsible’ bloggers will not follow any informal codes.

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Just back from Barcamp Ireland 3. What a day, so packed I couldn’t possibly get to half the talks (which ran concurrently), but I managed three lectures and the panel discussion. The event was held in the beautiful Digital Hub, off Thomas St in Dublin. The building is fantastic, with bare brick walls and natural lighting throughout, and would make a fantastic billionaires studio apartment.

I’ve posted some wikified notes. I grabbed several mini interviews, on TFM’s sweet but pricey Roland wav recorder (check out the uber cheesy website), not enough material for a full blown podcast, but I’ve thrown them up, below. Also attempted to moblog throughout the day, with mixed results.

Mini Interviews

Sean O Sullivan of Rococo.
Robin Blandford creator of Comment Casting.
Darren Barefoot of Capulet Communications.

Update: Fixed the wiki link!

Many thanks to John Breslin for organising Irelands first Webcamp, last Wednesday 7th March. The afternoon was an enlightening look into the development, search, analysis and productive uses of social networks.

I’ve wiki’d some notes on event. Ina O’ Murchu of DERI should be posting videos of the talks in due course.

Particularly interesting was the response of designated Bebo’s spokesperson, Mark Tarbatt of webvertising firm Generator, to my questions about potential Bebo censorship. The impression Mark (whose firm seem solely responsible for selling branding on Bebo, at least in Ireland) gave was that, in the event of a conflict between a user video or community (the example I provided was a hypothetical ‘killer coke’ video on Votetube’s bebo profile) and a Bebo advertiser, such a user or community could be removed. This seems credible given that Mark stated Bebo’s recent adoption of comment moderation occurred not in response to problems of user abuse or sexually explicit spam, but to satisfy the desire of Coca Cola (a bebo advertiser) to prevent ‘harassment’ on it’s branded bebo site.

A quick search of Bebo indicates the existence of just such a conflict.

Francis McGillicuddy and I are planning a trip to the US on the 6th of September - We’ve set up a Wiki for our trip, as well as a yahoo maps route plan (updated).

It’s a pretty ambitious trip, taking in LA, San Francisco, Yosemite and Death Valley National Parks, Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon and ultimately New York. Any advice from anyone whose taken a similar trip would be appreciated! We’ll be in the states from 6th of September till the 1st of October, if you’re on our route, let us know and maybe we’ll hang out.

I’ll be producing a podcast of our trip - but as it shall be recorded on Sony’s customer hating DRM’d to death NetMD minidisc device, there probably won’t be any actual posts till our return. There will however be blog updates, both on this site and Francis’s Bogger Thoughts blog.

Also I’ve set up a moblog of sorts of photo’s taken with my snazzy new Razr V3, complete with RSS.

CoComment, the new service which provides a unified place to collect a feed of your blog comments through a bookmarklet which ‘co-comments’ your conversations, have finally added retrospective commenting. This is perfect for users like me who don’t have a home terminal, and frequently can’t install bookmarklets. The feature allows users to go back and restrospectively tag comments they could catch at the time of posting, and will hopefully make it a lot easier, and more worthwhile, to comment on blog postings from now on.