Oh dear. Quite a bit of talk this past week about the notion put forward by some people in the US to form a committee on blogging ethics.
There’d be a domain registered (blogethics.org) and the committee would work on keeping the blogosphere honest so helping prevent evil marketers spin their deceitful ways.
Just hang on a minute. The whole idea of some group in the US – or anywhere else, for that matter – setting themselves up as blogging overlords is completely ludicrous. No, let me restate that. It’s a total crap idea.
Who is this group to tell me in an Orwellian manner what I can or cannot do on my blog? What gives them any right at all to think they can speak for other bloggers about ethics? And why would they assume that I am so totally stupid and brain-dead that I need some nanny committee to preach to me about honesty, comfort levels and other bilge?
Luckily, it looks like common sense will prevail. Jeff Jarvis, one of the nominees for this potential cabal, isn’t too keen on the idea (and, perhaps, about even being nominated):
We don’t need a committee. We don’t need an authority figure or moral guidepost. This is a distributed world, a world owned by the whole. We are ruled by the wisdom of the crowd. […] There, I just saved myself a committee meeting.
The last word is from The Head Lemur (“He may be a bit crazy, but that would be your call”):
You will get control of my blog when you pry the keyboard out of my cold dead hands!!
I couldn’t put it better or clearer.