Seven ages: first puking and mewling,

Then very pissed off with one's schooling,

Then fucks, and then fights,

Then judging chaps' rights,

Then sitting in slippers, then drooling.

That’s Robert Conquest’s précis of Shakespeare’s ‘all the world’s a stage’.

So what happens when all the world’s a website? Puking, drooling and various other bodily fluids you can’t mention on the radio — — and internet pioneers Tim O'Reilly and Jimmy Wales aren’t impressed. They recently proposed a ‘civility code’ to try and banish offensive and abusive comments from the net and the response… Well, imagine standing behind a jet engine as a truck of bovine excrement gets thrown into the works and you’re getting close

Sanctimonious wannabe Net Nannies crushing free speech, went up the cry! A desperate attempt to save the net from turning into a broadband sewer, came the response!

There’s a point that gets lost somewhere in the middle.

The internet has its virtues – and I’ve been on both sides of the blogger/commentator divide. But I’m also extremely sceptical about any utopian vision, because human beings just don’t play along. Jerks, like the poor, are always with us – especially when they can do so anonymously, and safely out of range of the law or a good right hook.

Russell Brown’s take over at Public Address-dot-net is worth a read and (for once) there’s very little I’d disagree with. Part of me cringes at the mindless vomit that passes for rational argument, especially in local political blogs. Too often an interesting debate devolves rapidly into a screaming match at the Christmas party from hell.

Is a highly procedural "code of conduct" much more than smugly preaching to the converted? I don’t think so. Like Justice Potter Stewart's infamous definition of pornography, I can’t describe civility, but I know it when I see it.

Here’s my modest proposal, and nobody should be surprised it’s a market-based consumer-driven response.

Free speech is a precious thing worth dying for – even when it makes you wish you were dead. But that freedom doesn’t oblige anyone else to pay attention. Witless tossing off isn’t only bad manners, it’s bad business – even in the marketplace of ideas.