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March 31, 2007
Broken windows?
While I applaud the efforts of Tim O'Reilly and others to calm the stormy waters of the past week, after Kathy Sierra's very public account of what she was going through, I can't help but think that constructing "codes of conduct" isn't really going to help. The people who would work on such a code and abide by it are probably not the people going to use the Web to attack people in the first place.
And those who choose to attack are not going to be stopped by a mere code of conduct. Just as crime has not been stopped by laws, crank-callers still abuse the phone regardless of the ability to follow caller-ids or people are hounded by paparazzi regardless of a body such as the Press Complaints Commission.
If anything, last weekend showed that weblogs are nothing special. They are now just as much a part of life as any other media we choose to use. And we can always choose not to.
As with any other media, we will unfortunately need to wake up to the fact that weblogs will be abused just as much as any other form.
And I'm afraid that while Robert Scoble's taking a week off from blogging "in support of Kathy" is a signal - it may well be a signal that the abusers scored.
Posted by Matthew at March 31, 2007 08:01 PM