With all this talk of a Blogging Code of Coduct there doesn’t seem to be much discussion on who exactly such a Code is trying to make feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Bloggers? Current blog readers? New blog readers? The mainstream media?
If such a code is targeting fellow bloggers, trying to bring civil bloggers closer together or create a close circle of the “cream of the crop”, then it’s entirely unnecessary. That group exists in seperate forms through conversations on the blogs. Established bloggers already know who their friends are, already know who fellow civil bloggers are, and already read, converse with, blog about and generally interact with those bloggers.
The same applies for current blog readers. For the most part they’ve already culled out the good from the bad, the blogs they want to include in their “Daily Me” and the ones they wish to ignore, either because they don’t like the blog or its content.
If the code is targeting new readers, well, that gap is already filled through the blogs themselves. A new reader will stumble across, say, Kottke.org and get a feel for the blog and its content and find sites that Jason Kottke also likes by looking at his blogroll or the blogs he links to in his posts. Blogs inherently create a spiderweb of community through their linking and readers are quick to notice this, whether they’re new to the medium or not. That is the nature of blogging and blog reading.
So that leaves us the mainstream media. Is the code merely a way for blogs to say, “hey, we’re mature and can take care of ourselves, regulate ourselves, and therefor should be taken seriously”? Blogging is not about being mainstream or trying to appeal to the mainstream. Blogging’s about filling in the gaps of the mainstream, fleshing out the skeleton the mainstream creates or catching the pieces that fall through its cracks. If we start making ourselves more like the mainstream, more appealing to the mainstream, we become more mainstream and fail to achive our goals and develop our own voices.
Ultimately, a blogging code comes from a sense of community. Blogs create their own community with blogrolls and hyping the work from other blogs. It is through these communities that people will develop relationships that will shield them from attacks and threats that the code aims to prevent. These communities provide core groups to lean on in a time of need but also a chamber which will not allow the negative echo to gain a foothold.
My friends and I have differing opinions, but there is an unwritten agreement of civility among us, a self regulation of sorts that simply comes from finding common ground and being there for one another that transcends our differences. The same thing applies to blogging. When you start putting it in writing you take away its spirit, you make it cookie cutter and stiff and you open yourself and all “legitimate” bloggers to greater regulation from outside sources. Today it’s a draft code, tomorrow it’s federal law.
If we can truly take care of and regulate ourselves, do we need to put it in writing? Or can we simply have a sense of civility and associate ourselves with those elements that highlight it?
We bloggers can translate this community and self regulation into something casual readers can follow through the use of blogrolls and conversations within the community. By talking to one another in public forums like our blogs and not looking to the blogs that we individually feel do not reflect the tone we’d like to take, we create that code on our sites. We share with our readers our thoughts on what blogs are worthwhile to us by simply directing them there, not with a badge but with relevant posts and actual content. Though this we can serve all potential audiences of a code without opening ourselves to the limitations the code presents. And everyone ends up with the warm fuzzies in the end.