Can't We Just All Get Along?Can't We Just All Get Along?

Apparently not. And some wouldn't have it any other way.

Anyone who has ever posted anything on a site with respectable traffic has been on the receiving end of what is, at best, mean-spiritedness, and at worst -- well, much worse.Most of this sort of thing comes over the transom anonymously, and one's first taste of the more vitriolic aspects of the otherwise exciting give-and-take that characterizes the Web can be a shock to the system. Of course (as has been discussed ad infinitum) the medium itself removes all social barriers to this kind of behavior. As one colleague of mine once memorably observed, it's like handing out free ski masks and machine guns to the general population. Someone's bound to get hurt. How bad the injury--and therefore how seriously we should take cyberbullying--continues to be the subject of intense debate.

Which is why Tim O'Reilly's call last week for a blogger's Code of Conduct raised, as could be expected, a firestorm of commentary, ranging from the (predictably) abusive, to respectful disagreement, to the enthusiastically supportive. O'Reilly has since drafted such a code. Here are the high points:

1. We take responsibility for our own words and for the comments we allow on our blog.