Publisher Tim O’Reilly apparently came to his senses on Monday after a wave of criticism, deciding to nix the idea of badges to accompany his now infamous Blogger Code of Conduct. Responding to critics, O’Reilly wrote, “As far as the quality of the badges -- I agree that they're a bit hokey, but they seemed like a good place to start. The idea came from Creative Commons, where simply putting a badge is a link to a set of statements about copyright. Perhaps text-style badges like CC uses would indeed be less hokey.”
Pawning the hokey-ness of the badges off on Creative Commons was an unfortunate choice of scapegoat, but there is some comfort in the fact that O’Reilly was honest enough to call his own badges hokey (“hokey” being the tamest expletive used by several prominent bloggers to describe the badges). Late yesterday, O’Reilly finally relented, responding to one critic by writing, “…very good comment about the negative tone of the civility enforced badge. I think you've nixed that one for me. We'll think of something else.” Nice, but maybe it’s time to leave the blogger patriarchy in less hokey hands.
Photo: Duncan Davidson
