Neil McIntosh has written, on his personal site, a robust reponse to the "entirely unnecessary" proposal for a code of conduct for bloggers (below, and below). He warns:
Seriously, my biggest fear is this kind of stuff tars a huge group of people with a rather nasty brush -- "you blog, therefore you are a misogynist", for instance. That's the kind of thing that gets repeated in a million newspaper stories, puts people off reading or joining in, and just begs trade bodies and legislators in to have a look around before taking some horrifically misguided action. There's probably a bureaucrat with a pen twitching in Brussels right now.
The main paper also had a big piece today -- Howls of protest as web gurus attempt to banish bad behaviour from blogosphere -- from Ed Pilkington, who is based in New York. (Update: and on Wednesday April 11, a long comment piece from Jonathan Freedland.)
Many will remember Neil as a former deputy editor of Guardian Online and the man mainly responsible for getting the Guardian into blogging. The two of us started Onlineblog at Blogger, the forerunner of this Technology blog, and Gamesblog was Neil's idea. He's now head of editorial development at Guardian Unlimited.
