It’s a well known fact that the level of activity surrounding a blog (specifically in the number and quality of posts and comments) can tell you a lot about the vitality of the community that the blogger has created. However, are all posts and comments good? A few weeks ago the blogging community witnessed a pretty horrible attack on a well known and respected blogger which really captured the attention of the overall blogging community. It also sparked Jeff De Cagna’s 338 and Counting post which is what brought the situation to my attention.

In response to the situation Tim O’Reilly issued a call for a “Bloggers Code of Conduct”. Tim went on to enumerate some initial thoughts based on some discussion at O’Reilly’s ETech conference. Among them:

1. Take responsibility not just for your own words, but for the comments you allow on your blog.
2. Label your tolerance level for abusive comments.
3. Consider eliminating anonymous comments
4. Ignore the trolls.
5. Take the conversation offline, and talk directly, or find an intermediary who can do so.
6. If you know someone who is behaving badly, tell them so.
7. Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t say in person.

While this was short of codifying universally acceptable blogging norms, it did lead to a fury of activity. Yesterday (03-April-07), Tim posted an update announcing that a draft had been created, a domain name (bloggincode.org) had been secured (not yet active at the time of writing) and a review process via a wiki will be put in place to solicit feedback.

The draft code includes the following provisions:

1. Take responsibility for our own words and for the comments we allow on our blog.
2. Don’t say anything online that we wouldn’t say in person.
3. Connect privately before we respond publicly.
4. When we believe someone is unfairly attacking another, we take action.
5. We do not allow anonymous comments
6. We ignore the trolls.

If you subscribe to the code, you can obtain a badge indicating that you do. Likewise, if you decide to be more liberal with what you allow in your comments, you can display a badge that indicates that as well.

Instead of trying to come up with a witty or extremely thoughtful synthesis, I will simply offer Tim’s own words:

As Doc Searls famously said in The Cluetrain Manifesto, the book he co-authored with Chris Locke and David Weinberger, “markets are conversations.” We celebrate the blogosphere because it embraces frank and open conversation in ways that were long missing from mainstream media and marketing-dominated corporate websites. But frankness does not have to mean lack of civility. There’s no reason why we should tolerate conversations online that we wouldn’t tolerate in our living room.

I fully believe in freedom of speech and freedom of expression but I have to draw the line at personally attacking someone simply because they are an easy target. Is the Blogging Code of Conduct an example of a socially responsible response to a horrible situation or simply common sense / respect for others codified? I suspect it is the later as opposed to the former. Regardless, it makes me wonder why moral values and respect have seemingly disintegrated, especially in such a public forum.

Is it really possible to separate the personal from the professional? I have been struggling with this issue for the past few months both in my daily life as well as my blogging. What follows is a description of the struggle and explanation of why I ultimately have decided to start a new blog (Associated Knowledge) to serve as my public speaking venue and focusing this blog on my personal / family life. For those of you who have bookmarked Nomadic Learning, I would appreciate it if you could change your bookmark to http://www.associatedknowledge.com and update your RSS feeds as well. Please read on for more details.

Many of you have come to know me through my Nomadic Learning blog. Initially I had intended to use it as a way to share my thoughts surrounding life, my family and my travels. I also figured that while I was at it, I could use it as a portfolio to showcase some of my work and technology related experiments. For almost 9-months that is exactly how I kept it and it wasn’t until I attended the ASAE Technology Conference in February of this year that things started to change.

It was at that point that I not only found additional topics to write about, but I also discovered a network of like-minded individuals (The Association Blogoclump) who were also interested in similar topics and were passionate about sharing their thoughts. At that point I tried to maintain my blog as dual-purpose, but I quickly realized that similar to my actual life, separating what is personal from professional online is not an easy thing to do.

I really do love my family and know that there is more than enough material that I could share in a blog format. My family and I have the opportunity to do a lot of really fun things together. And with a toddler in the house, there is never a shortage of activity to write about and share pictures of. However, I am also extremely passionate about the association that I work for, the work that I do, and talking about the intersection of technology, learning and associations. While I am not able to discuss many of the specifics of my day-to-day work, I have been able to share my thoughts, ideas, opinions and experiences in more of a general manner pretty regularly since I started blogging about it.

A few weeks ago, my son and I accompanied my wife on a trip to a conference in Detroit she was attending. It was at that point when I realized the true challenge of blogging about professional activities and personal life in the same venue. During the time that we spent in Detroit my son and I made many memories (visiting Comerica Park and Ford Field, attending the Detroit Autorama, etc.) but I really didn’t feel it was appropriate the share those pictures with folks who read my blog for thoughts and ideas related to technology and associations.
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In the first part of this post (Blog Readership…The Challenge) I briefly discussed my conversation with Jeff De Cagna surrounding his concern about the lack of blog readership and some of my initial thoughts about why it could be happening and ventured an educated guess that part of the issue could be attributed to the lack of awareness of these great resources. As I closed out I suggested that another contributing factor could be related to education. It is worth noting at this juncture that I am not trying to solve the problem through this series of posts. Rather, I am simply attempting to stimulate a discussion, not only among the bloggers, but also with the target audience to see if some of our assumptions need to be re-examined or paradigms changed.

With that being said, I want to examine the educational side of the issue to see if any ideas bubble to the surface as I look at it more closely. I do know that there is definitely a set of expectations on both sides of this issue that for better or worse have shaped the face of blogging. On the bloggers side there is the expectation that “if we build it, they will come” suggesting that simply the act of putting up a subject or topic related blog will attract a sufficient amount of readers to sustain and grow a site over time. At least that’s the way it was when blogging emerged as a activity conducted by the technical elite and those that had nothing better to do with their time. A few years ago, you never knew what to expect when you went to a blog site on any topic and the quality was questionable at best. Generally, these blogs seemed to be well left or right of the median, and were written as personal rants or personal marketing pieces by anyone who had an opinion on anything and were largely a waste of time (for the blogger and the reader) as opposed to insightful and thoughtful discussions on germaine topics that encouraged genuine discussion written by intelligent individuals.
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