According to a recent article from the New York Times, Tim O’Reilly and Jimmy Wales are working to implement a code of conduct to the blogosphere.

There are some who feel that the implementation of some third-party code of conduct would somehow be an impediment to free speech but I think these arguments are dubious considering nothing I’ve read seems to indicate that either O’Reilly or Wales are arguing that this should be a mandatory implementation. Rather, they are just drawing up some specifications that people can either choose to, or not to, adopt.

I don’t think what they are doing is worthy of criticism (unless O’Reilly decides to trademark the code), nor is it really worthy of much buzz. Actually, I don’t think this would have been a story at all if it weren’t for the name recognition of the two individuals who are involved with the story. What they are doing is not fundamentally different than what online communities have been doing since the days of Usenet: implementing some form of etiquette that is intended to mediate the social interactions between users.

The fundamental differentiator I suppose is that the technology and form of Usenet and BBS seems to lend itself more naturally to community in contrast to the technology and form underlying blogging and the blogosphere.

I wonder if a community-driven approach to the moderation of comments would be more desirable…simply allowing blog readers to flag entries and based on votes, to delete entries.

It would probably go a fair way towards quelling the free-speechites.