The French have developed a “code of conduct” for bloggers—a project begun in Feb. 2006 but with longer roots—that has been adopted by 200 blogs and two major political parties. It mixes netiquette (don’t use all caps), best practices (“When replying to a comment, it can be useful to quote from the original text in order to be understood”) and ethical rules (“Comments of a racist, anti-Semitic, pornographic, revisionist or sexist nature will not be accepted…”).

From my point of view, it is one possible set of guidelines. We should have lots and lots of them so that — when appropriate — bloggers can make explicit the norms already implicit on their sites.

This evening at 9pm in France, there’s going to be a Second Life discussion about the code with the person responsible for the Net campaign of Ségolène Royal. Details here. (I’ll be on a plane, so I’ll have to miss it, which is just as well given my ludicrously bad French.)

(I blogged about blogging codes here and about my own guidelines in the comments to this post.)

[Tags: blogosphere blogs codes morals cyberbullying ]

Categories: blogs dw