When  Stephanie West Allen sent me a link and asked if I had seen the latest attempt by the major players to bring rules to the internet, I dismissed it out of hand.  But as the movement picked up steam, it struck me that these self-annointed rulers of the digital world could do some damage.

In the New York Times, David Carr wrote about butthurt journalists who felt that their works for hire weren’t getting the respect they deserved.

O.K., you can almost hear the digerati seizing with laughter at the idea that a pew full of journalism church ladies is somehow going to do battle with the entire Internet. But Mr. Dumenco compares his effort to the editorial rules promulgated by the American Society of Magazine Editors, which have come to shape how magazines distinguish editorial from advertising. It’s an imperfect system with a fair number of outliers, but over time the magazine group devised guidelines that had significant influence and at least set standards that people could argue about.

Church ladies need rules to keep the atheists from behaving poorly, and so they formed a committee.

An august list of names has signed on to the effort: David Granger, the editor in chief of Esquire; James Bennet, editor in chief of The Atlantic; and Adam Moss of New York magazine. Of course, all three oversee robust Web sites that do a fair amount of aggregating themselves.

The concern wasn’t so much the explosive growth of “curators” and “aggregators” in the blogopshere, efforts which I personally view as the lazy person’s way to pretend they matter as they add no substantive value and reflect the antithesis of thought, but that these parasites weren’t doing enough to send readers back to their sources and bolster the bottom line of “real” journalists. You know, the people who get paid by the word and the periodicals that advertise various hygiene products.

One of the things they came up with is the curator’s code, which  Megan Garber at the Atlantic describes as the way to steal things without being a jerk about it.



Pretty cool looking symbols, right?  Do you care? Me neither.

I’m all for attribution, not because the Overlords of the blogosphere tell me I must, but because it’s the right thing to do.  One of the great beauties of organic growth is that there is an intrinsic reward for doing the right thing, as well as a natural smack for being naughty.  It’s inconsistently applied, and often ignored, but norms develop and when they make sense, they get used.  Not because someone puts a gun to our heads, but because bloggers embrace good ideas because they’re good ideas.

At Gawker, Hamilton Nolan has some fun, writing “We don’t need no stinking seal of approval from the blog police.”

The day that I ask the editor of Esquire for a seal of approval on my blogging is the day that I sign a fabulously lucrative contract to write for Esquire.com. And you, Adam Moss—no. No.

Look, what Dumenco is trying to do is simply to codify “how to blog without being a huge prick” guidelines that all decent online writers already know. Give credit to sources of information, link back, don’t blockquote to a ridiculous degree (you guys at The Atlantic might want to double check on that one), etc. Everyone who cares about not being a prick already does these things, or tries to do them, and, if notified of not doing them, should correct them.

And that’s how normal people do stuff. If their problem is with the outliers, the “rebels” who refuse to adhere to the rules, good luck trying to get them to obey.  But the blogosphere has always dealt with its own when someone gets hinky.

If there are grievances over these types of editorial blogging issues, there is already a system in place to deal with them: someone writes a pissy diatribe, someone else writes a pissy diatribe in response, and everyone argues over who’s right and who’s wrong. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis: This is what makes the media blogosphere go. Ceding this discussion to some committee of self-ordained experts would be a bore

Just as growth in the blogosphere is organic, so too is its ability to self-police, which it’s been doing since the beginning.  Someone says something stupid or does something inappropriate, and someone else jumps down their throat.  If a blog sells crap, no one reads it.  If a blogger steals from others, others call it out and ridicule it unmercifully.  This was how the wild west and the blogosphere worked, and worked incredibly well.

Sure, there are always the nutjobs who ignore all protocol, or the mousketeers who only want smiley faces on their readers, but here’s a newflash: these aren’t your audience regardless of what others do, and you don’t really want them anyway. If someone doesn’t find your writing organically worthwhile, you can’t put a gun to their head and demand they love you.  Plus, it would be a crime against metaphors.

Many of the people who now want to sit on the Blog Judgment Committee started out as upstarts themselves. So they are self-aware enough to know, deep down, that this sort of endeavor is doomed to fail, simply because it presumes that the upstarts of tomorrow will fall in line. That’s not how this blog thing works.

They can make whatever rules they like.  They can create symbols full of deep meaning that don’t exist on my keyboard. I don’t care, because it won’t change a thing about how I write or how the blogosphere works.  As long as I don’t have to join a club to keep my Capt. Marvel Secret Blogosphere decoder ring, I couldn’t care less.

Of course, if someone I respect tells me I’m acting like a jerk, that would matter. See how it works?