Tony Hung argues very cogently that what’s really needed is a comments policy, not a code of conduct, but I think he’s missed the point. If you want to maintain the moral highground when you censor people who have got out of line in your comments section, particularly if you are in an argument with them at the time, or have a “history” with them, then it’s very handy to be able to point to a code that applies not only to them, but to you, and not just when you’re in the comments section. Otherwise you’re clearly at an unfair advantage. If when you point to these “principles” you can also point to the fact that a fair old number of people have subscribed to exactly the same principles, and that they were arrived at by a consensus process, then that defintely increases the height of your moral highground.
Whereas if you have a comments policy that doesn’t apply to you or your blog posts, that somewhat lowers it.
And the ability to censor people who have got out of line is the point. If you have no code of conduct or comments policy, then what are you going to do when someone posts something appalling? You either engage in ad-hoc censorship or you make up a policy in the heat of the moment (looks bad!) or if you’ve totally rejected the idea of censoring comments and it’s gotten out of hand then you might have to shut the whole blog down (as happened with Meankids and unclebobisms, which started this whole mess).
In general I see no reason that there shouldn’t be some shared principles out there that I can point to rather than having to point to my own. If there’s a badge (but the sheriff’s badge is awful, Tim, sorry) that makes it easy for commenters to spot the principles of my blogging and comments section, then all the better - just like the Creative Commons for copyright. I’m not expecting anyone come in and *enforce* anything on me, but then I wouldn’t choose to subscribe to a set of principles that I disagreed with, so if I transgress then I’ll withdraw and apologise. There are people out there who refuse to apologise for anything they’ve said, but I’m not one of them - I think if you can’t admit when you’re wrong, then people aren’t going to trust you when you claim that you’re right. More importantly, how are you going to trust yourself?
I’ve got a little badge on this blog pointing to a “Blog Honor” code of conduct. It relates to disclosure policy, and in truth I linked to it because I didn’t have time to write my own, and it seemed fairly close to what I believed at the time (and still do).
The “code of conduct” that Tim O’Reilly is calling for does not cover disclosure, but the real question is whether linking to any shared codes of conduct is a good idea. To say the least, it’s somewhat controversial. I think that as posted, it’s impractical and doesn’t show the depth of thought I would expect from Tim, who’s one of the biggest blogospheric thinkers out there. Sadly he’s being more or less shredded in the comments of the assembled masses, who hate even a whiff of censorship far more than they respect Tim or Kathy, it would seem. Seth Finklestein is an anti-censorship crusader (who I generally have admired in the past when I’ve run across his writing), so it’s no wonder he’s one of the loudest critics, and he makes a valid point about enforcability. I think his comments insinuating this is designed to reinforce the tyranny of the supposed “A List” are dead wrong, however. [1]
In my case, I thought “good start, needs more work” and got stuck in over at the Wiki they set up. I think having a voluntary code of conduct that people can sign up to if they want is not a bad idea if it’s structured properly, which to me means it’s got variants and versions, and ideally you can fit it all in a microformat as well as link an online version that not only shows the code but links to the discussion regarding each point so that people can see why those points were arrived at. So if people want to allow anonymous posting, or what to play with their trolls, but still want some sort of set of declared principles to point to when they delete a comment for stepping over the line, then they can do that.
The alternative to a shared Code of Conduct is posting your own individual one, and I think it’d be very hard to go past borrowing and tweaking this one by Allen Jenkins, as Tyme did. Allen has is own wise words about all this.
If there was going to be a shared code of conduct, then you’d want it to be agreed as part of a shared process, not handed down by fiat. What an enormous number of Tim’s commenter seem to have missed is that this is exactly what Tim wanted to happen, and why there was a wiki and a mailing list set up to discuss it. But naturally enough everyone ignored those and fired away on their blogs or in comment sections.
[1] The problem of “enforcement” happens when someone who’s blog is wearing the badge ignores the code. Obviously it can’t be enforced on anyone who hasn’t signed up for it.
SethF appears to be arguing that an “A lister” involved in such a dispute would win any such arguments with the help of the “Pilot Fish” wanting to impress them and scared of being, ah, I don’t know, excluded? Called out? I’m not sure. I’m not buying it. Arguably being attacked by an A-lister is a great way to get noticed - and if they’re wrong to attack you then it’s going to be obvious to some of the other big guns, who will call out that A-lister, and bingo, you’re subscription count jumps up.
The moment another “A lister” comes in on the other side, then any “Pilot Fish effect” will pretty much evaporate because they wouldn’t know which way to turn. And I think it’s a delusion that the “A listers” somehow all conspire in some fashion to stay on top of any given argument. I also think calling the rest of the blogosphere “pilot fish” is pretty damned derogatory - certainly anyone who wants to gain an audience won’t want to be seen to be a slavering toadie, and anyone who doesn’t want to gain an audience is really unlikely to care what these supposed A listers think of them. So I just don’t buy that line of argument at all.
Besides, the reason these people are the “A list” is partly because they usually make a certain ammout of sense. I can only read so many feeds, and anyone who stops making sense just gets deleted.
Of course, the problem with wanting to engage in this particular conversation, which covers a topic of great interest to me (and was long before Kathy’s shock announcement), is that it’s taking time away from Interclue, which I will get back to forthwith!
Ok, so I started this post 3 weeks ago, and have only just got around to finishing it. Bad Seth, slap hand. But there’s been so much going on, and I’d sorta been waiting until Interclue was definitely nearing launch before poking my head up in the blogosphere again.
A month ago was what we in NZ call “Waitangi Weekend” or roughly “the weekend closest to Waitangi Day”. For the last decade or so I’ve celebrated this particular weekend by going back into the past, doing Medieval re-enactment with my friends in the SCA.
This year I instead paid a trip to the future, having scored a late invite to Kiwi Foo Camp (aka “Baa Camp” (an in joke too long to explain), organised by Russell Brown and Nat Torkington, who are both awesome overachievers in their own different ways.
In fact, most of the people I talked to during the weekend were awesome in some fashion. As an invite only event, with the karma of O’Reilly and the two organisers behind it, sponsored by Google and Rod Drury’s Xero, they really were able to pick and choose, and although there were plenty of people they realised ought have been invited, the ones they did choose were pretty damned interesting. I think I may have been one of the last ones to sneak onto the invite list, apparently later on it was more a matter of “Ok, if it’s Jesus Christ come to announce the second coming, then *maybe* we’ll let him in…
So Jayne and Glynn, thanks for prodding me to ping Nat about it when you did! Was good travelling with you (and Damien and Phil).
The event started with everyone introducing themselves with 3 relevant words (eg I was “attention deficit infojunkie”, and Rod Drury was “Stock Options. Hiring”), and filling out forms with among other things, the top 3 things they would bring back from the future if they had the chance (I chose Immortality Pills, a Pocket Quantum Computer, and an iCar, but later I decided I should have gone with a USB2 compatible storage device containing a copy of the future’s version of Wikipedia - or, if their drive was big enough, a copy of the future’s Internet Archive Project…now that would be a big drive.)
Then everyone wrote down on big sheets of paper what they were going to talk about. Goodness, but there were a lot of interesting sessions. The problem was that there were 5 different sessions per slot, and I usually wanted to see at least two of them! Later on I discovered it was even worse, because there was usually someone hanging around the common area who I really wanted to talk to *as well*. So I usually wanted to be in 3 places at once.
Highlights
Our Minister for Communications was great value. I think everyone was impressed by the depth of his understanding of the issues surrounding telco reform. He also was able to get a sense of the consensus in the room regarding the need for peering policy, which is something that has driven everyone a bit batty since the major Telco’s stopped doing it - for a while now traffic that used to travel from one box to another inside the WIX or AIX has had to go via Australia, because our local BigCos are hoping the SmallCo’s will pay them interconnect fees. Judith Tizard was also there, and definitely seemed to be enjoying herself.
A fantastic performance from the Vospertron guys. Conversation overheard in the carpark afterwards was along the lines of: “so, what microprocessor do you use in these light suits?” - “Uh, it’s a PICAXE…” - “Wow, AWESOME, I market those. I’ve got something to write about on our site tonight!”. The other cameraphone in this video belongs to Russell Brown, who I introduced myself to afterwards. He’s a really down to earth and severely clueful media guy, who’s right across technology and politics in this country. I like him.
Showing Interclue to a bunch of people, who were actually pretty impressed on the whole. My actual presentation wasn’t as good as I wanted, I wish I’d spent more time preparing for it, but the week before was just madness. Got some useful feedback on things people wanted to see, none of which we’ve actually managed to implement yet, but it’s all on the drawing board.
Rod Drury’s demonstration of Xero - wow, now that was what I call a presentation. You’d almost think he’d done this sort of thing before…
The Firefox 3 show and tell - some great things coming up there.
Talking with Asa Dotzler, who is a very clever man. In fact, all the Mozilla guys there were wicked smart. But Asa was speaking my language - the big picture stuff, why Google needs Mozilla, how Firefox is assuring the future of the web as a platform, etc. Asa is the head of QA - essentially nothing gets into the final release of Firefox without him signing off on it! He also started the Spread Firefox website, and is a key evangelist for the Mozilla Foundation. [1]
Chatting with Mike from Pitch Black, his friends in the entertainment space, and seeing their awesome multimedia mashup demos. I first saw Pitch Black perform at Roots Festival in Kaikoura - they had the last set of the night and by the end of it I remember thinking “Pitch Blue”. Awesome electronica and great visuals. Kudos to Nat and Russell for inviting some people from the more entertaining side of the geekosphere.
Playing Werewolf for the first time. I didn’t last long. I was a werewolf. I picked the two smartest fast-talking villagers I knew, killed the first one in the first round, but failed to convince the other two werewolves to nab the second one, who fingered me in the next round. Doh! Unfortunately that particular game ended at 4am, I was somewhat drunk, and I forgot to set my alarm. So much for sunday morning :(
Top 3 things I really regret missing out on:
Quinn Norton’s session on Bodyhacking (apparently she was appearing with the aid of Provigil, which is marketed under the brandname “Modavigil” in this country, you can get it for “Shift Worker Sleep Disorder”, and yeah, it’s useful, but it’s not a magic bullet.)
The session from the Public Address bloggers, who are great value.
Chris di Bono’s session on the OLPC project, a project I’ve been meaning to blog about for a while, as it is one of the definitive Philanthrogeek projects of our time…but I was having a good conversation with Asa Dotzler at the time, so I missed it. Bugger.
There are a lot of people I want to get back in touch with and continue conversations started at Kiwifoo, but every time I started an email I got to a certain point and remembered that I didn’t actually have time to talk, and that anyway I should at least get the new website up, which we still haven’t finished. I’ll go back through my drafts soon and ping them.
After it all, I came back, caught up on sleep, progressed an important deal for the company, and then headed out for the final night/day of Canterbury Faire. I was probably the freshest person on the site, apparently everyone had been having a fabulous time, and I’m so sorry I missed all the action, but well, Kiwi Foo was a bit of unique event (well, hopefully not unique, and hopefully not on Waitangi weekend next time). I did make the Steward pretty happy when I fetched cold caffeine for him and his crew during the hot and dusty packdown.
[1] I’m pretty Bullish on Google and Mozilla at the moment, but Microsoft have finally shipped Vista and Office, which means that they have a bundle of manpower that’s suddenly not completely overoccupied, they’ve been hiring some very smart people like Jon Udell, and Google has decided that they want to start charging for their online office apps, so it’s seriously game on at this point. We (Interclue) are intending to stay more or less neutral, and support both IE and Firefox (and Safari, and Opera, and others) as best we can with the resources we have. We wanted to launch with both Firefox and IE supported, but IE just proved to be a bit more difficult to work with than we hoped - we are almost there, but I decided to give priority to giving the best possible UX for one rather than an average UX for both at the beginning. Hopefully I made the right call on that.
It’s that little “Blog Honour” badge, bottom right of my blog. I put it there after reading Stowe Boyd’s comments about Pay Per Post, and finding that honor badge on his blog. I actually couldn’t care less about my pagerank, it’s the principle of the thing, I’m metaphorically tilting at windmills just like all the other bloggers who wish people would quit making a mess of the web as they try to monetize it.
To get an idea of how roiled up the blogosphere got about this PayPerPost “Payola” scheme, count the trackbacks to the original Techcrunch post. Mike has blogged about it about it serveral times since, and it’s a controversy that PPP definitely encourages (even to the point of paying payola for people to post their point of view), because as they know, it’s all about the PageRank.
This is a from from a comment I recently made on TechCrunch, in which I indulged in an awful lot of alliteration:
For those of you who simply think Arrington has an Agenda related to his Advertising, I think you’re wrong.
People, PPP = Paid Pagerank Pollution. That’s really what it’s all about so far as I can see. I’m stunned nobody has used the “P” word in this thread so far. I mean, that’s the Point of all this, isn’t it?
The Pagerank algorithm doesn’t care if the reviewer said something sucked or not. All links are good links, more or less, in the same way that all publicity is good publicity, more or less. So it makes perfect sense to allow bloggers to pan the product they’re linking too - just so long as they link to it.
I’m presuming that most of the PPP customers are being advised by their SEO people (or are in fact SEO people themselves) because PPP links seem like a perfect way to drum up pagerank in a way that must be very difficult for Google to defeat. Of course over time they will figure out some algorithm for detecting PPP shills, er, agents, er, whatever they’re called, and will mark down their pagerank accordingly, but there will always be more willing to play the game. (For those of you new to this game, your site’s pagerank depends strongly on incoming links, and it is the #1 traffic driver on the net)
Now, if everyone declared on their posts that they were PPP agents in a distinctive and clear way, then Google could automatically discount those links as meaningless for the purposes of pagerank calculation, which would mean that the smart SEO people would stop recommending PPP, and eventually advertisers would pay a lot less per post.
So, I don’t think PPP will do that.
But Google has so much data they could just work it out algorithmically. Ie if PPP got *too* popular Google might just start watching for where known PPP shills link to, and detect new shills based on noting which other blogs link to the same place at the same time. All known shills could them have their pagerank docked from then on (pagerank is transferable via links, so if a source is “tainted” the easiest way to tweak the results is probably to decrease the PR of the source). However I suspect it would have to be making a genuinely large distortion in the search results before Google would care, and in reality Google no longer cares so much about search quality since they probably sell more adword clicks against bad natural results, and they’re so far ahead of the others on search quality at the moment it’s not really to their advantage to “try harder” in this regard.
So if Google doesn’t really care, what’s The Problem?
The problem is the collateral damage. I consider a business to be morally wrong if it destroys more value than it creates. And paying others to do the destruction for you is even worse. Currently PPP is slowly dragging down the average value and pagerank of all blog content - blogs are becoming just that little bit less trusted as sources of unbiased information, which is what everyone is looking for. However, balanced against that are the PPP agents who actually put a bit of thought into their post, are honest about the fact that they are being paid (and being honest means saying so within the post, or right next to it - posting a policy somewhere no one looks does not cound), and create little nuggets of value.
My strong hunch is that at the moment PPP does more harm than good. If they forced their agents to be transparent then it would swing back the other way and on average they would be creating value, but then they would probably make less money. So let’s watch and see what they do.
But giving it some more thought, I’m going to be more condemnatory. Mr Arrington gets it exactly right when he says that “their disclosure policy is like the Tobacco Industry sponsoring tobacco research“. Essentially, they’re damning themselves with this dangerous “disclosure” duplicity.
We’ve pushed out the second closed beta of our browser extension for knowledge workers, bloggers, and other heavy web users, and we are looking for feedback. At the moment you’ll have to sign up and accept the beta embargo to find out what it actually does, but we can tell you that:
It’s free.
It’s not spyware or adware.
It takes about a minute to install and although it has many options it works great “out of the box” for most users.
The learning curve is about a minute long. After that it starts saving you time.
After accepting the embargo and reading about the extension you can always choose not to install it. But if you take part in the beta program you’ll be given a free upgrade to the subscriber version when we release it.
At the moment we’re only releasing the firefox version. You can sign up at the same place to get notified when we release betas for other browsers, or when we release the first production version(s) to the public.
