Limiting the capacity of cowards to hide behind anonymity while protecting the rights of courageous people who need it is what I think people could more profitably focus on….

On the whole people are sensible and able to converse on a mature level without a set of rules in place.

What we got out of it was a hearty and often heated debate and the chance to discuss some serious issues – such as cyber-bullying and sexism online. But we all learnt from it.

In some circumstances a set of guidelines for a community are appropriate, but in becoming a member we usually agree to those terms on sign-up. This is more about a Publisher’s own right to decide what content they wish to host. The reasons can be legal as well as personal and in some cases practical(such as the ongoing need to filter spam).

A good example would be for a social site aimed at children where an obvious code of conduct might relate to deleting any sexual references.

Personally, my take is that a community will set it’s own rules through time. But as Doc Searles points out the “blogoshpere” is not a “community” as such – it is a “place”.

I’d rather have the nasty elements brought to the surface and dealt with than create a shallow pool of civility.

Not only are blogs “places”, as you say, but they are varying places with varying norms, and with varying ways of producing those norms. No one code of conduct has any hope of suiting all blog communities, any more than one set of social norms will work for every social situation. “Who creates the norms?” is an interesting question indeed (and not quite as simple as “my blog, my rules”) – but the answer sure isn’t “Tim O’Reilly”, no matter where you are.

Getting down to the nitty-gritty, I have a particular problem with this:

“We connect privately before we respond publicly.
When we encounter conflicts and misrepresentation in the blogosphere, we make every effort to talk privately and directly to the person(s) involved–or find an intermediary who can do so–before we publish any posts or comments about the issue.”

I’m having trouble making any sense of this. It seems to have the goal of erasing every bit of public conflict and dissent within the blogosphere, which is obviously nonsensical. Public debate is the whole raison d’etre of many, many blog comment communities, and of many inter-blog conversations.

The painted-on dichotomy between “No dissent vs Anything-goes” doesn’t get O’Reilly out of this one: there are many, many places where dissent is welcome, but threats and hate speech are not. Blogs in that spectrum are a large part of the colour and fun of the blog world, and are places where a lot of productive conversation and argument-honing can take place.