Sunday, April 22, 2007

Responsible Commenting

I think this issue is so important. Plan to explore it in more detail later on in the week when I have some time.

I agree with Ze'ev..please visit the site Responsible Commenting and leave suggestions and comments.

He writes:

Last week I read about a blogger getting threats to her life by people commenting on her blog. Kathy Sierra who writes at http://headrush.typepad.com (it is a fantastic blog with some great insight into user interaction) received several life threatening comments and some very ugly sexual insults on her blog. I suggest that you visit her blog to read the details. We get hundreds of comments on Sportingo daily and for the most part they are insightful, add value to the conversation, present a supporting or opposing opinion or correct facts. Yet a very small amount seem to cross the line and turn very personal and ugly. Sexual or personal insults that have nothing to do with the article or other comments add nothing to the conversation and only subtract from it. As a founder of Sportingo which encourages a civil conversation among sport fans around the world I feel it is my responsibly to tackle the issue of inappropriate commenting. And take a clear stand about what we want and most importantly what we do not want to see in comments. We the people (that means all of us, blogers, writers readers) what to be treated with respect. We want to be listened to and listen to others, we want to argue, voice our opinion and raise controversy. We want to keep the right to our opinion, and we don't want to be censored, but we do want and expect to be treated with respect and dignity even if you find our opinion disturbing. I realize that free speech proponents will yell fool and call this post an attempt at censorship. I also realize that the line between keeping a civil discussion and censorship is a very fine line. Yet sexual insults and life threats have nothing to do with censorship they are plain wrong. Calling someone a cunt just because she wrote that her football team is going to beat the team you support is plain wrong.

We each need to set our own boarders, define our own set of morals and apply some plain common sense, and then go out and state our opinions, get a conversation going about what we as a global society of bloggers/ writers/ net citizens feel is the make up of a responsible conversation. But most important lets make it clear that we will not accept members of our community abusing our fellow citizens. We will stand up and use our key pad to state our disgust by their actions.

To encourage this dialog I set up a site www.responsiblecommenting.com my friend and very talented designer Udi Bobrovsky designed a button which I encourage you put on your blog, forum or website which shows your support to this issue. Please visit the new site and give me your suggestion on what else we can do to support this initiative and improve our community.


To include Responsible Commenting button to you web site, just copy & paste the following piece of code to your HTML page:



1 comment:

Diane said...

One thing I've noticed is that when rude comments are blogged they seem to leave no trail. No name attached, no blogger profile, nothing that attaches the words to a specific person.

If you don't have the courage to leave comments that can be tracked back to you then I think you are a coward who is using the internet to give yourself the power you don't have in real life.