God preserve us from the Well Intentioned (WI). In the wake of the shocking Kathy Sierra episode, the WI have managed not to conclude there are simply some unpleasant people in the world who we should ignore, or report to the police.

Instead, the WI have proposed a new Bloggers’ Code of Conduct. It includes a bar on being “disagreeable” and urges bloggers to take their differences… offline. They even want to appoint intermediaries when bloggers really disagree. Good grief. Predictably, there’s been a rather juvenile response from some to this overblown request for civility. But if, by some weird chance, it was actually adopted, things would be about to get very dull, very quickly, kids. As Jeff Jarvis is saying, I’ll be disagreeable if I want to be. Let’s make a badge for that and slap it on wur blogs.

Seriously, my biggest fear is this kind of stuff tars a huge group of people with a rather nasty brush - “you blog, therefore you are a misogynist”, for instance. That’s the kind of thing that gets repeated in a million newspaper stories, puts people off reading or joining in, and just begs trade bodies and legislators in to have a look around before taking some horrifically misguided action. There’s probably a bureaucrat with a pen twitching in Brussels right now.

Such action, and indeed this code, is entirely unnecessary. Why? Just think what this code implies:

• that blogs, as a genre determined only by shared design characteristics and a kind of content management system, require self-regulation in a way that’s a bit like mass media (newspapers, TV, radio, advertising) but in a way not seen among users of email, MySpace, Bebo, talkboards, instant messaging, Usenet (yes - you!) or the telephone.

• that bloggers breaking basic rules of decency - even the law - are common enough that blog readers want to see some kind of decency kitemark - “golly gosh - I keep coming across these snarky, abusive, threatening blogs! I wish there was some kind of ’safe blog’ ring!”. This isn’t my experience; most blogs don’t seek an audience beyond friends and family.

• that, despite all those, those bloggers who are unable to understand society’s views on their gross behaviour are somehow still aware enough to spot they should sign up for a code of conduct that, in the main, only repeats those obligations. And that then they’ll suddenly want to behave better.

• that, for the truly dumb, or twisted, or dangerous, there are not perfectly good laws and conventions designed to deal with everything from sexist abuse to death threats, from the promise of social exclusion and loss of attention right through to the threat of court and the clink. Not to mention employment contracts that insist their employees don’t bring the organisations they work for into disrepute.

My question: why even start drawing up a new code when there’s so much in the real world that should - and does, in really meaningful ways - regulate what you say? Because, after all, any online presence is just a layer on top of the rest of your life, not something that exists outside or apart from it (no matter what those crafty Second Life marketeeers tell you, kids).

Are there any bloggers for whom this list doesn’t already apply?

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