User:Sethop
From Blogging
My real name is Seth Wagoner and I'm from Christchurch, New Zealand
I blog at sethop.com
I was the sysop of a highly argumentative BBS for 10 years back in the dialup days.
I've been thinking about "best practices for online moderation and debate" for ages, but have been terribly busy with a bunch of other things so haven't really done much about it. I did notice that Clay Shirky was talking about it from the moderation perspective, some of the material on their wiki may provide insight here. Being awfully fond of KS and her blog, I've been following the latest fracas with some interest. I hope a net win can come of all this, although it will be awfully hard to make up for losing Kathy if she decides to leave the 'sphere.
I think the bloggers code of conduct is a good idea, but it needs to be handled with care.
For instance, we could go as far as defining a structure similar to creative commons, where there are multiple different types, and version numbers, of conduct codes. Just so long as the badges are distinct and link to a page with enough explanation, I think that would be a more effective long term solution than one set of rules that people keep arguing over.
I can certainly sympathise with those who feel this is all a bit of PC nonsense. When I was a pseudonymous political blogger I appreciated it when my opponents used ad-hominems and made off colour comments, since it essentially demonstrated their lack of any substantive arguments, and gave me all the excuse I needed to go to town on them if I wanted to. But it led to a collosal ammount of wasted time from all sides, and well, my time was probably a lot more valuable than theirs, so while I usually won tactical victories, strategically it was a bit daft. These days, I just don't engage.
I guess a key question is whether it's worth trying to write a CoC that would be useful to people who are happy to see "robust debate" on their blog (that includes a *lot* of political bloggers), but want some way to stop it from going *too far*, as opposed to bloggers like Tim who would prefer a much more "civil" debate. My opinion is that there should be more than one code, and each code should have versions. But that sounds like a lot of hassle which is why probably nobody's bothered yet. Which leads to the question of whether it's better to have one code for the moment because it's just simpler, and people can adopt it or not as they see fit.
Currently I'm supposed to be finishing up the launch prep for my new startup Interclue so my contributions here will be necessarily brief! But it's something I have a bit of insight into so I want to participate.
BTW Anyone who wants to try the beta of our awesome firefox addon, it's over at beta.interclue.com
[edit] Feed from sethop.com
- That Firefox 3 launch was quite a ride.
Well, life’s been a bit of a roller-coaster lately. We have been averaging about 2500 Interclue installs per day in the last few months after becoming a Mozilla recommended add-on, which is about 10 times as many as we were getting before that. On the other hand we also started getting a lot more uninstalls, [...]
- The Android Distraction
I saw this post on O’Reilly Radar and it inspired me to go looking at the list of available Google APIs. There are a lot of them. Google just totally rocks in this regard. I quickly picked one of the many product ideas I have lying about that I’ll never get around to implementing, and [...]
- Great start to the yearâ¦
Things have been going well, but it’s been extremely hectic. Have just recovered from Kiwi Foo Camp, which was awesome, and am now on the way to catch the end of Canterbury Faire. More details on those and the other things that have been happening after I get back.
- Boys, beers, and âboards at the Bohemian.
So it was another night with the wild and crazy boys [1] of TVIC (The Valley in Christchurch). TVIC is the second thursday of the month [2], but I’ve only just gotten the video I took off my Treo - I’ve been having problems with my sync softhardware, and with the impending launch of Interclue [...]
- Turing, XKCD, and Interclue 1.5
Here’s a screenshot of a link being previewed in the new Interclue 1.5 Beta, which you should install if you haven’t already. See the hint next to the magnify cursor you get when you mouseover a thumbnail in a the new clueviews? When you mouseover the comics in XKCD you can usually see a little [...]
- This may be the first and last time I mention sport on this blogâ¦.
I played rugby when I was in primary school. The geek in me won out by age 11, all that running around a sports field in mid-winter just couldn’t compete with curling up at home with my funky new ZX81. I guess I started watching again in my late 20s, mainly because my Dad is [...]
- Belated Barcamp Christchurch Notes
BarCampChristchurch was very cool. Already looking forward to the next one! I’ve had this post under construction for a while now, just been completely flat out for the past couple weeks. I ended being MC by default, which is a pretty unfamiliar sort of role for me, but Ben was busy liveblogging and Stephen was [...]
- BarcampWellington Mindmap
Julian has been LiveMindMapping instead of liveblogging, and he’s doing a pretty good job of it. Here’s a link to the topics he’s encountered so far during the BarCamp. Marek is talking about OpenID now and whether every Kiwi should have one. He’s been working on his own OpenID Provider recently. Fascinating.
- Now broadcasting from BarCampWellington
I’m in Wellington for BarCampWellington, focused on Government 2.0 in New Zealand. There have been some really fascinating discussions and presentations, with many different viewpoints being expressed. Currently sitting in a presentation from Julian Carver, one of the Christchurch based attendees who’s well known in Wellington from his consulting work on Knowledge Management. He’s discussing [...]
- BarCampChristchurch is underway!
About 40 of us have gathered in the CII Building for BarCampChristchurch so far and more are expected later. I was surprised how many folks turned up on time. Steven made the nametags, Nic and Terry set up the Wifi, and it’s all going rather well. I failed to get my talk on Browser Addons [...]
