I just read about the Blogger’s code of conduct being proposed and saw a few views on it. I follow some of the points listed in it and I do not agree with some others. I do not see why there should be a written list of rules for bloggers because it is each individual’s personal writing space. You may feel like doing something one day and then the next day you change your mind so some of the rules seem a little bit strange to me. The complete list is as follows (quoted from the post on John Chow.com):

1. Responsibility for our own words
2. Nothing we wouldn?t say in person
3. Connect privately first
4. Take action against attacks
5. a) No anonymous comments OR b) No pseudonymous comments
6. Ignore the trolls
7. Encourage enforcement of terms of service
8. Keep our sources private
9. Discretion to delete comments

Now I think that some of them are commonsense like #9. You obviously do have the discretion to delete comments if you do not approve of them. After all it is YOUR blog. But then I do not see how #4 and # 6 can go together. From my knowledge a troll is someone who makes an attack on your blog so they can get a linkback from you when you go out to trash them back. If you are going to take action against attacks then I think that would include taking action against personal attacks made by trolls on your site.

I do not mind people leaving anonymous comments sometimes. Again if I do not like what the comment says then I just delete it and it will not show up on the blog. Sometimes some people start off commenting as anonymous and then begin to post their identity and it is okay. I think the only time we need to worry about anonymous comments is when they become negative and attack our blogs, our readers, our personal lives or anything else we hold dear.

From what I can see this seems to be an okay idea but I just do not see too many people with PERSONAL blogs taking it seriously. It may be easy to implement in a set of blogs that belong to a group, like a business blog but I think that John Doe who is running a site on how to save money or how to find money in the grass or how to build birdhouses out of toothpicks is not going to adhere to any blogger’s code of conduct in any strict sense.

Besides how will this be implemented and what will be the consequences for not following the rules? People get templates for free but some people pay for their blogs so how are you going to ‘punish’ them for not following the rules?

What are your thoughts on this code of conduct and will YOU be following it or not?