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Call for manners on the nasty www

Abuse and vilification, much of it anonymous, has been an unfortunate by-product of the world wide web. Sometimes what has been written has been defamatory, and certainly offensive. Now, someone is trying to bring civility into the frame, as this NY Times article reports:

"Is it too late to bring civility to the Web?

The conversational free-for-all on the Internet known as the blogosphere can be a prickly and unpleasant place. Now, a few high-profile figures in high-tech are proposing a blogger code of conduct to clean up the quality of online discourse.

Last week, Tim O’Reilly, a conference promoter and book publisher who is credited with coining the term Web 2.0, began working with Jimmy Wales, creator of the communal online encyclopedia Wikipedia, to create a set of guidelines to shape online discussion and debate.

Chief among the recommendations is that bloggers consider banning anonymous comments left by visitors to their pages and be able to delete threatening or libelous comments without facing cries of censorship."

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