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A Call for Manners in the World of Nasty Blogs nytimes

I've had enough of all this blog bigotry


"It's not that I'm against civility. But I am against schoolmarms presuming to tell me how I should behave"

Jeff Jarvis Monday April 16, 2007 The Guardian

After a recent rash of nastiness in one small corner of the blog world, a few prominent online pioneers - tech publisher Tim O'Reilly and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales among them - responded with a fit of dogoodyness, proposing a code of conduct for bloggers, complete with a sheriff's badge that site owners could display to certify that they "enforce civility". Their code called for banning anonymous, abusive and ad hominem comments and told us to have our disagreements in private. On a wiki, where others could edit it, the pledge attracted platitudes like a VW bumper: "One can disagree without being disagreeable."

I despised the idea and blogged in opposition. It's not that I'm against civility. But I am against schoolmarms presuming to tell me how I should behave. I distrust saccharine gestures (my town in New Jersey put up a sign decreeing ours to be a "frown-free zone" and every time I pass it, I frown). And I say that O'Reilly's well-intentioned but misguided effort is ultimately dangerous.

Mind you, I run a civilised blog. I kill comments there that are abusive or even just irritatingly off-topic - but rarely, for my blog friends are mostly civil. I am also no fan of anonymity. I tell commenters that I grant less credence and respect to what they say if they do not have the guts to stand behind their words. I stand by my words and mistakes with my name and face. But that's my choice. Others may choose differently. They may remain anonymous for a reason - they blog in China or Iran - or not. They may be nasty indeed. But I'm free to read, link to or ignore them, just as I talk with or ignore people in my neighbourhood, free of regulation that would force or stifle conversation.

In the US, we are privileged to have not only a first amendment but also a section 230. I recommend both to you in the UK. Section 230 says that as a site owner, I am not responsible for content placed on my site by others but I am free to edit it. Before this was enacted, site owners who tried to clean up interactivity increased their liability if they missed something bad, which motivated them to keep hands off and let anarchy reign or to shut down interactivity altogether. Congress wanted site owners to feel free to improve discourse, so it protected them from liability if someone misbehaves. This enables both freer and more civil conversation. Yet now O'Reilly et al suggest that bloggers should take responsibility for everything that happens on their sites. I fear this surrenders the safe harbour of section 230. It puts free conversation at risk.

More fundamentally, O'Reilly's campaign misinterprets the internet itself. It treats the blogosphere as if it were a school library where someone - O'Reilly would do us the favour - can maintain order and control. It treats the internet as media, like a newspaper or TV show that is edited and sanitised for our protection. But it's not. The internet is a place. We don't consume content there; we communicate and connect.

When I moved into my frown-free place, I didn't put up a badge on my fence saying that I'd be a good, grinning neighbour (implying that without that badge, I'm a bad one). I didn't pledge to act civilised. I just do. And if I don't, you may judge me accordingly. As another blogger said in the reaction to O'Reilly's commandments, "You are your code of conduct". Are there rules and laws? Yes, the same ones that exist in worlds physical or virtual: if I harm you on the street corner or in a paper or on a screen, the recourse is the same. Why should this new world work any differently? Why should it operate with more controls and controllers?

In the end, I'm afraid that O'Reilly's crusade only gives reporters their latest excuse to slam blogs. It inspired a page-one New York Times headline labelling the crusade "A Call for Manners in the World of Nasty Blogs". I got many calls from reporters wanting to do more stories about our nastiness. So I proved their point and got nasty in return, lecturing them all, arguing that they were viewing the blogosphere as a monolith and a mass when, in fact, it is the place where we finally can speak as individuals. But more important, they were judging us by our worst, which is like saying that the Guardian cannot be trusted because it's a newspaper, just like those ratty red-tops, or that you are a hooligan just because some football fans are. It is blog bigotry. I growled at them.

No one's going to tell me not to be disagreeable.

· Jeff Jarvis is a journalism professor at the City University of New York who blogs at buzzmachine.com

Tighter restrictions on military blogs anger US soldiers


· Ban aimed at curbing critics of Bush, say troops
· Pentagon moves to stop spread of intelligence

Ewen MacAskill in Washington - The Guardian May 5, 2007


US troops in Iraq have reacted angrily to Pentagon restrictions aimed at curbing internet postings from war zones.

The Pentagon cited the risk of providing sensitive information to insurgents. Blogs and emails from troops in the field can often be extraordinarily vivid and indiscreet. One last weekend from a soldier in Iraq advised a trooper in the US who was about to deploy in Iraq on ways to watch for and detect explosive devices planted by insurgents.


The Pentagon said blogs had to be cleared first with officers, and that soldiers would be punished if they publicly revealed troop movements, planned raids, travel itineraries, photographs of casualties, new technology or material that could compromise their location.

Reacting to the ban, soldiers said the real reason for the curbs were their negative comments about the war, including scepticism about George Bush's claims about progress. Soldiers in the field and former soldiers, in blogs posted on sites such as Black Five, an unofficial site run by former paratrooper Matthew Burden, said the regulations would be inoperable with most troops obeying the rules but dissidents finding ways round the ban.

Mr Burden, editor of The Blog of War, a book pulling together accounts from the field, also criticised the decision: "No more military bloggers writing about their experiences in the combat zone. This is the best PR the military has - its most honest voice out of the war zone. And it's being silenced."

Soldiers at bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, often bored, spend lots of time on the internet. One posting to Black Five, from Uncle Jimbo, described the Pentagon's move as "an incandescently stupid decision of the military to allow the anal-retentive, mistake-avoidance police have their way".

And it added : "It's not like we aren't already getting our asses kicked in the information war. Now let's take the one authentic voice, the one group best able to tell the real story and let's shut 'em down. Fools!"

The guidelines require soldiers and civilians working for the military to obtain approval from an officer for every blog entry and some emails.

Anyone who fails "to protect critical and sensitive information" could face punishment including a court martial. Major Ray Ceralde, who worked on the regulations, said that the aim was not to have soldiers clear every public posting with commanders.

"Not only is that impractical, but we are trusting the soldiers to protect critical information," he said.

The rules, he said, did not affect private emails. Instead, soldiers were expected to consult or clear with commanders when they start a blog, in part so they could be warned about the information which they cannot publish.guardian

Iraq veteran wins blog prize as US military cuts web access




· Literary award for former soldier's online dispatches
· Critics brand Pentagon's new rules 'self-defeating'


US soldier Colby Buzzell, whose account of fighting in Iraq's Sunni triangle has won the 'Blooker prize' for best book that began as a blog on the Internet
US soldier Colby Buzzell, whose account of fighting in Iraq's Sunni triangle has won the 'Blooker prize' for best book that began as a blog on the Internet. Photograph: Reuters


The timing of the award is almost as striking as the writing which it honours. A former American machine gunner's memoir of a year's tour of duty in Iraq based on his blog has just won a major accolade at precisely the moment when the US military high command is clamping down on blogs among the rank and file.

Colby Buzzell was awarded the £5,000 Lulu Blooker prize for My War: Killing Time in Iraq, which was voted the best book of the year based on a blog. It triumphed over 110 entries from 15 countries.

The memoir was drawn from a blog he kept while in Mosul, in northern Iraq, in 2004, in which he portrayed the texture of daily life there, from listening to Metallica on his iPod to watching his fellow "grunts" surf the web for pornography.

The paradox of Buzzell's victory is that it quickly follows the revelation that the Pentagon has introduced new rules restricting blogs among soldiers, fuelling speculation that live and unadorned combat writing from the field such as Buzzell's may be the last of its kind.

The new rules require all would-be "milbloggers", as soldier-publishers are called, to submit blog entries to supervising officers before posting them. That turns on its head the existing rules which allowed soldiers to post freely, with the onus on them to register their blogs and to alert officers to any material that might compromise security.

Yesterday the defence department went further and announced it was blocking access "worldwide" to 13 communal websites, including YouTube and MySpace from military computers and networks. General BB Bell said the move was to protect operations from the drain on computer capacity caused by soldiers downloading videos on these sites.

But prominent military bloggers said this was another move by commanders to try and regain control over ue of the internet. Matthew Burden, a former major in the US army who runs the most popular milblog, Blackfive, with 3 million unique users a year, said he had been contacted by several serving soldiers who said they were going to stop posting. "They are all putting their hands in the air and saying, 'That's it, I've had enough.'"

He said the rules were self-defeating and would deter blogs such as acutepolitics@blogspot.com, which is written by a specialist who defuses roadside bombs. "Take that down and you are removing one of the most positive messages for what the army is doing in Iraq," Mr Burden said.

Mr Buzzell, now 30, was sent to Iraq in November 2003. He had joined the army at a time, he said, when "I was living off Top Ramen [pot noodles] in a suburb of San Francisco and my life was going nowhere". He discovered blogging by reading a Time article while in Iraq, and started posting eight months into his tour.

He rapidly built up a huge following and was profiled in the media. After six weeks an order came down that his blog should be stopped, without any explanation; but by then he already had 10 different publishers clamouring after him.

Buzzell said the new restrictions would hurt combat soldiers and their families. "It's hard for them out there, and this will make it harder. It will lower soldier morale for troops who are on their second or even third tour." He also regrets the tightening grip over blogging on a personal level because without it, he said, he would now be "washing dishes in a restaurant somewhere, back to eating Top Ramen".

As it is, his book has been translated into seven languages, and he has embarked on a freelance writing career for Esquire magazine, among others. "This is a totally screwed up policy," he said. "The commanders are just really nervous because they can't keep control any more."

· Extract: My War: Killing Time in Iraq

Thursday August 4 2004
Down in the hatch, I was frantically scanning my sector when suddenly about 300 metres away from us, over by the traffic circle, I saw two guys with those red-and-white jihad towels wrapped around their heads creeping around a corner. They were hunched down hiding behind a stack of truck tyres. I could tell by their body language that something was up. I placed the crosshairs right on them and was about to waste them, but for some reason I didn't pull the trigger. These guys were not dressed in black like the guys earlier and from what I could see they didn't have any weapons on them. Something told me that I should wait for just one, maybe two more seconds. Then I saw another guy come creeping around that corner with an RPG in his hands. As soon as I saw that I screamed as loud as I could, 'RRR-PPPPP-GGGGGGG!!!' into the CVC. My crosshairs were bouncing all over, so I gathered my composure as fast as I could, put the crosshairs on them, and engaged them with a couple of 10-round bursts of some .50-cal, right at them.

Nobody moved from behind those tyres after that.

A couple minutes after that the Stryker that was parked 10 metres in front of us, Bravo 65 Victor, took an RPG that came from a building that looked like a parking garage that was diagonally across the street. It scared the ******* **** out of me when they got hit ... We all pointed our weapons to that building and started lighting it up with everything we had. Bravo 65 immediately reported casualties, "We're hit! This is Bravo 65 Victor! We have wounded!!! We need CAS Evac. Time: Now!" came over the radio.

Lt Armeni, who was inside that vehicle, got severely injured and needed medical attention immediately. The RPG penetrated right through the armour and sliced Lt Armeni's guts completely so that they were hanging out of his stomach ...

I then saw a man, dressed mostly in white, with no weapon on him, run for his life, out of the building, and right in front of our vehicle. I lowered the .50 cal at him and tried three times to hit him, missing him every time. Several other people tried shooting at this guy as well, and somehow the ******* got away.

· Biography: Colby Buzzell

Age: 31

Born: in San Francisco, now lives in LA

Hobbies: skateboarding and hard rock

Job: machine gunner turned author

Started blogging because: 'It sounded like a good way for me to kill some time out here in Iraq, post a little diary stuff, maybe some rants, links to some cool ****, thoughts, experiences, garbage, crap, whatever.'

Literary idols: Kurt Vonnegut and Hunter S Thompson

Favourite sounds before a mission:
the Cure, the Smiths "and a little bit of the old school U2"




guardian

Chinese actor writes world's top blog



There are blogs that are popular, with thousands of hits every day; there are plenty more that are not so hot, lucky to get 10 page views a week. Then there is Xu Jinglei's blog, which can pull in visitors at a rate of more than 100 every second.

The Chinese actor-director has been declared the world's most widely read blogger, with more than 100m page views in less than two years.

Xu Jinglei recorded her 100-millionth hit last week, according to the Beijing News, and did so without writing about sex or kiss-and-tell stories - but focusing on her work and day-to-day life. Xu, 33, started posting in October 2005 on sina.com.cn. Last year, as the popularity of her site began to mushroom, she published a book of blogged articles.

Blog search engine Technorati said that last year Xu's blog recorded the most incoming links on the internet. Huang Ke, an analyst with Sina, told Reuters that Xu's website had had 2m hits since July 12 - the day she broke the 100m mark. Writer Han Han, ranked second by Sina, will soon exceed the 100m mark too.
guardian

Bloggers of the world unite



The question of where the blogosphere goes from here is an open one, but some bloggers think they have hit upon an answer: they mean to get organised. At last week's YearlyKos convention in Chicago, a panel was convened entitled A Union for Bloggers: It's Time to Organise.

Do bloggers need a union? Even in the blogosphere, the point of such an organisation eludes many. "The idea of a blogger labour union," said Mike Pechar of the right-wing news blog the Jawa Report, "seems to make as much sense as having a union for people who sing in the shower."

It's also unclear what sort of demands a union of bloggers would present, or to whom. There are 94 million bloggers, according to the search engine Technorati. But they don't have bosses, and the vast majority don't have any customers either. If bloggers were to strike, who would suffer?

Any group with the will to do so can organise, of course, and bloggers are as entitled to collective representation and its benefits (in America, this might well include health insurance discounts) as anyone else, including steel workers or the National Union of Shower Crooners. And many bloggers now rightly consider it to be a profession - a poorly paid form of journalism.

There remain, however, several fundamental obstacles to the creation of a blogger's union. The blogosphere is not an arena that lends itself to consensus; it's too diverse and people usually prefer to take sides and argue. Political blogging boasts a large conservative wing, which is opposed to unionisation in principle. Those bloggers who seek the legitimacy that union membership might bring are already being courted by existing bodies such as the National Writers Union.

For many, the whole point of blogging is that there is no governing body, no rules, no restrictions, no collective spirit. To impose any organisation, virtual, voluntary or otherwise, would turn blogging into something else entirely. In a virtual community with as many points of view as there are bloggers, where do you draw the picket line? guardian

The interview: Jessica Valenti
The author and 30-year-old feminist blogger has faced rape and death threats from a group of online misogynists. And then there were sneers about an infamous picture with Bill Clinton. Is that the price of fame when your website is read by half-a-million people?
[guardian

Terence Blacker: Spinning out of control in the blogosphere

It has been a grim week in that increasingly murky place, the blogosphere. In America, the widespread practice of slipping secret payments to internet "reviewers" has caused the Federal Trade Commission to rule that all covert advertisements appearing in blogs must be declared. In Paris, the woman whose nom de blog was "La Petite Anglaise" has announced that she will no longer be sharing intimacies online. Here a story about the Prime Minister's health has been revealed as a nasty little rumour from a small-time blogger.

It is not a particularly shocking fact that everyday unkindness, dishonesty and prurience are magnified on the internet through a combination of anonymity and speed. What is altogether more surprising is that there are still quite a few people who argue that the information and opinion provided by blogs have an integrity lacking in our compromised mainstream media. It is surely time to blow the whistle on this peculiarly idiotic idea.

I have been reminded recently of the screeching sanctimoniousness that prevails among bloggers, not to mention their double-standards, by a small incident in my own professional life. Following an article about the philosopher Alain de Botton accepting a commission to market Heathrow Airport with an instant book, I received a number of emails from readers, including one from a David Edwards. The problem, he said, was not the "branded conversations" of De Botton but a general "corporate domination of the mass media". In my brief reply, I made a passing mention of the fact that, personally, I did not feel the heavy hand of corporatism on my shoulder.

A correspondence ensued. Hearing from readers is an interesting aspect of the job of writing a column and Edwards was making a valid, if slightly annoying, point. Corporatism had surreptitiously entered my heart, he argued. Journalism had a long filtering system through which only the most acceptable establishment apologists survive. If I wanted to find genuinely unbiased news, I should go online. He mentioned a number of news-monitoring websites.

Modestly, he failed to mention the site of which he happens to be the editor. The next day, my emails were posted in full as part of his blog. It seemed a bizarre turn of events. Someone arguing for greater honesty – his website had been created because the media's "unwillingness, or inability, to tell the truth" – had cheerfully impersonated a disinterested reader, then lifted private correspondence without permission into the public domain, at no point declaring his own position.

For me, it was also a melancholy lesson. As it happens, there was nothing particularly revealing in what I had written but there could have been; I like to respond to personal emails in a straightforward one-to-one manner. Not any more. In a hilariously Jesuitical piece of reasoning, Edwards argued that because I wrote to him as an anonymous member of the public, he had the right to pass on my emails to other anonymous members of the public. He had spoken to lawyers whose view was that an email was fair game, "unless it was made in the context of an established confidential relationship".

I wrote one last, brief email. Making columnists more careful when they communicate with readers was, I suggested, an odd way of campaigning for more honesty. Edwards has elected not to publish my email. There is, it seems, a limit to openness online.
Independent

Ben Gunn, the blogging prisoner locked in a struggle
Ben Gunn was 14 when he killed a friend. Almost 30 years on, his blogging and protests about prison regime injustices ensure that he is still no nearer release. By Eric Allison
guardian

The Serbian boy, 12, getting death threats for his blog

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic in Belgrade - Independent