In the aftermath of the Kathy Sierra affair, Tim O’Reilly felt called to propose a general code of conduct for bloggers last month. Although I understand and sympathize with O’reilly’s urge to react somehow (I agree that some people loose decency in online communication and handle anonymity extremely bad), the choice to suggest a general code of conduct as known from old fashioned CSR is totally futile and highly untimely as well. Here’s why:

  1. Bloggers are highly heterogeneous. If codes are not to be vacuously generic and abstract, they stand no chance of being sufficiently operational to change conduct.
  2. As such, codes will remain dead tombs of half harted morality and empty gestures. Most welcome for those convinced that all talk of ethics is hypocritical and poison to the effort of actually bringing about ethical changes.

Instead? It can be of no surprise to you that my alternative is putting an Actics widget on your blog, stating what kind of ethical values you personally live by and how. If you for instance live by the value ‘respect’ you could state the action ‘Always remove comments with no positive intent’ or ‘Only allowing comments not insulting other readers’. Then your ‘local’ ethical criteria on your blog is much more personal and concrete. AND it allows your readers to feedback on relevance and your ability to walk the talk.