Deborama's WWW Number 19 - Call for a code of conduct

A few weeks ago I featured the excellent website "Creating Passionate Users", authored by Kathy Sierra. Only a few days later this appeared there, although in a different format, as Sierra announced that she was being forced off the blogosphere by an unbearable (and unbelievably intense) amount of anonymous comment abuse. We are talking death threats, violent sexual violence fanstasies, etc. none of which were even pretending to be relevant to specific posts or ideas from the blog. She has in fact returned to the blog, in a low-key way and still very much in the mode of coping with the aftermath. This post itself attracted 1165 comments, which are still preserved here. In response to this and other similar incidents, two prominent web-guys, one a prominent blogger and the other a founder of Wikipedia, issued a post titled Call for a Blogger's Code of Conduct. Unsurprisingly there has been an enormous buzz of controversy from the "call". The Guardian's Jonathan Freedland has one of the most thoughtful and balanced of the reactions.