Call for better Net manners

Maybe what’s happening in the blogosphere will spill over onto the social Web at large. If it just gets social networkers thinking and agitating for civility and integrity in the social sphere as well as in blogging, it’s a good thing. Just look at the sheer size of the blogosphere: At last count, there were 70 million blogs, “with more than 1.4 million entries being added daily, according to Technorati, a blog-indexing company,” the New York Times reports. “For the last decade, these Web journals have offered writers a way to amplify their voices and engage with friends and readers. But the same factors that make those unfiltered conversations so compelling, and impossible to replicate in the offline world, also allow them to spin out of control.” And that happened recently (see “Call to stop cyberbullying”). Now Tim O’Reilly, crediting with coining the term “Web 2.0” and Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales have joined the chorus, putting forth a blogging code of conduct. They’re great, particularly: “Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t say in person” and - for any parent-child discussion on the subject – would suggest adding the universal ethic of reciprocity to the mix.