Updated: "Theoretically going to be in Monday's NYTimes"

Updated: Here's the story.

One of my BlogHer co-founders, Elisa Camahort, does a great job of describing the interview she and I did with Brad Stone (no relation) of The New York Times. Stone said his focus was the code of conduct recommended by Tim O'Reilly, who invoked the BlogHer Community Guidelines we launched with http://blogher.org on Jan. 30, 2006.

Here are some of my comments that didn't make it into the story: As the author of the guidelines, I told the reporter, I don't believe in an overarching, one-stop-shopping code of conduct for all blogs or all Web sites. Images that are appropriate for a blog devoted to the war in Iraq would never work on a parenting site, for example. They shouldn't have to play by the same rules. And we all know how I feel about the First Amendment. :)

That said, I appreciate the leadership Tim O'Reilly (for the record, I've never met him) is trying to show when it comes to asking people to take responsibility for the communities they create. As I told Brad Stone, "Turns out there's no law against being a jerk. However, there are laws against cyberstalking on the books in 45 states." Don't miss Elisa's eloquent comments in her link above.

BlogHer's community guidelines look a lot like any journalistic code. We don't allow harassment or stalking, libel, copyright infringement, plagiarism, revealing a third-party's confidential information or spam (stupid annoying pointless messages, typically e-commerce and porn). However, we don't screen comments before they go live on our site and it's still your right to violate our guidelines - we just reserve the right to delete your content.

The rest of my opinions on the topic can be found here:

• "Hating Hate Speech: Safety for Kathy Sierra and all women online"
• "What do you do when you're cyberstalked, taunted or abused online?"

Comments

[Skye]

No disrespect to Mr. Scoble, sincerely, but the comparison to Iran seems a bit extreme. I read his post about why he doesn't want to sign on to O'Reilly's code of conduct, and he had some good points that were well thought-out. It would be nice to see his comments in context so we could more fully appreciate what motivated that remark, the same way you've laid out your comments that were not included in the story.

I think it's fine to have some pre-made comments policies, codes of conduct, etc. available online for folks who want to find one that works for them and run with it. But I'm always going to create my own on a case by case basis.

[nelle]

Interesting subject... it would seem logistically impossible to set standards across the blogosphere, your approach and outlook is the most sensible - set what you believe is appropriate for your spaces.

This whole attack stuff is very disconcerting. Although it has nothing to do with blogging, apparently the Rutgers women's basketball team is now getting hate mail.

It never ends.