In the wake of the debacle amongst the “A” listers in which a prominent female blogger is threatened with sexual abuse and death, I find that even the MSM (that’s mainstream media, not men having sex with men) ended up writing about it, specifically wondering whether or not we need a blogging code of conduct. Darleene muses about who would even enforce such a thing, but interestingly, we already have a code of conduct.

In the early days of the Internet, even before 1993 and the Eternal September, we had Netiquette, eventually codified in an actual RFC (What is an RFC?) by the Internet Engineering Task Force, the organization tasked with promoting Internet standards.

Netiquette is specifically covered by RFC 1855 (official plaintext version), which was formalized in October 1995, and like much of Internet planning, was intended to remain future-proof. So while it doesn’t specifically mention blogs (mostly because the term “blog” didn’t exist until around 1999), it does address one-to-many communication, which is essentially what a blog is useful for.

And enforcement will be performed exactly like enforcement was performed on Usenet or in IRC—”by loud, vociferous debate, flaming and counter-flaming, and eventually by kicking and banning of select targets by those who have the power to do such things.

So you see, blogging has been and will continue to be subjected to the flame wars and pedantry that used to be confined to September, but which is now still eternal. Newbies, as always, lookout. It does remain to be seen what the next big one-to-many communication format will be.