Duncan Riley> many readers would be aware of the discussion between the nets best known money bloggers Nick Denton and Jason McCabe Calacanis on the issue of blog ethics. We’ve touched on some of the issues here at the Blog Herald before, but a new idea was put forward by Nick Denton last week proposing a Blog Ethics committing comprising of Jason McCabe Calacanis and Jeff Jarvis. I looked on with interest but didn’t blog it aside from a small mention in a related post. Why? Something just didn’t seem right. Then it dawned on me.
Representation.
Now I have nothing than the upmost respect for all three, and I think the issue of blog ethics is one worthy of debate, but the question arises: who died and made Jason, Nick and Jeff the gods of blog ethics?
Any proposals for a broad set of blogging ethics can only be made with broad consultation by a group representative of different bloggers. 3 white men aged 33+ from the United States is not very representative.
Perhaps the proposed blog ethics committee can look at a framework for the development of a code of blog ethics, which may or may not include some sort of representative body in which bloggers can vote, an Association of Bloggers if you like.
The Association could also represent bloggers on important, non-political (well, should be non political) issues such a blog standards (including RSS), blog/ comment spam, freedom of speech, and a voice for bloggers with groups such as ICANN, W3W and even bodies such as the United Nations on issues based on internet discourse.
Now of course I am by no means suggesting that the establishment of such a body would be easy nor without debate. But as such a large body of individuals, unified by our love of blogging in its many forms, it could achieve great things.
