Being a blogger for quite a few years I couldn’t help but read Tim O’Reilly’s post about a Code of Conduct for bloggers, following the Kathy Sierra incident that flooded TechMeme with outrage (and rightfully so) with the preposterous personal threats against Kathy.

And having read and thought about it, I decided not to write about the proposed Code of Conduct because honestly I knew others would do a great job of dissecting it first. But there’s a couple of ideas that I feel are important to bring up at this point:

Blogging is about community, and any community has bad seeds. This is one of the consequences of being human - you are bound to have people disagree with you, dislike your work and diss your efforts. Not being “right” for everyone is what makes you strive to become better every day. Just imagine a world where no one would voice their opinion against you - perfect, right? Wrong.

This makes it easy to assert that yes, anonymous comments are wrong or to be frowned upon, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they shouldn’t be accepted. People do feel more comfortable speaking their minds about certain things if they do it anonymously - again it is only natural. There’s obviously a big line between an opinion and a threat, and here naturally common sense applies.

It is the nature of the blogosphere to be “unmediated” (remember the whole “We are the media thing”?), and a Code of Conduct only serves as an excuse for traditional media to discredit both bloggers and those who read blogs. Naturally rules apply to blogs - but those should only be the rules upon which society itself is based on. The blogging community doesn’t all move in the same direction, and that’s the beauty of it. There’s no need for a formal ruleset to control the tide.

This is obviously a philosophical question and not a moral question. We all understand when lines are crossed and action must be taken, but isn’t trying to regulate something that excels in (well,) entropy and unmediated growth a little too “weird”?

I’ll be in San Francisco (and going up and down the bay) from the 25th of February to the 3rd of March, catching up with some people and companies. I’ve been missing the bay area and a lot of people since I came back over a year ago so I’ll try to make up for that by paying everyone a visit.

If you’re around the SF bay and want to meet up for drinks or a quick chat, drop me an email (fred at webreakstuff dot com) and lets set it up. And even if we never met but you want to pick my brain and exchange ideas, do get in touch - I want to make the most of this week even though I’ll be going over more often in the future.

The relationship between innovation and geography seems like an ever returning meme in the New York Times. Today, they’ve published an article called “When it comes to Innovation, Geography is Destiny”. It would be useless for me to try and refute the theory again, because I’ve been there and done that time and time again - so here are the cold hard facts about life outside the valley:

• Less concentration of creative people - Less people to tap into about a new idea or new product. Less networking possibilities, as few places and events gather the creative minds together to build a culture of ideation.
• Less experimentation - There’s more of a culture of “use” than there is one of “create” - this is a problem particularly grave in europe when it comes to the web and technology.
• Less capital - naturally the VC eye is over the valley and little over India and China. Other places get only a small percentage of investment when it comes to technology-oriented innovation efforts.

Case study: ourselves

We’re a small company that’s grown out of opportunities started in the valley, but we’ve established ourselves in Portugal (where our whole team is from) for several reasons, mostly of a personal nature. The majority of our clients is however (you guessed it), between San Francisco and San Jose.

It sometimes feels claustrophobic to have the ideas and not the space or environment to put them into practice. We haven’t really found a solution to that problem, but I keep thinking about it. Not having VC readily available makes you try harder and bootstrap efficiently. Not having people to tap into around makes you work harder to engage in global conversations.

Embracing constraints applies perfectly to our position. We use the distance to produce better work. After we’re done setting the vision for a project (where communication is essential), we’re in our own space, alone although always reachable, creating towards a final solution. It involves trust (to overcome the distance), and it involves creativity - but aren’t those two key aspects of any project?

Conclusions

I’m an optimistic, and I like that idea to blend into the image of Webreakstuff as a team. As such, not being in the valley is an annoyance, but not a show-stopper. As long as we have the energy to keep working with our clients or on our own projects, the valley’s always at an airplane-reach. And so is everything that’s good about the place.

I love the conference space, and I love startups. Thats why it keeps shocking me that startups are being extorted to present at DEMO like it’s going to make their whole business. Seriously (and I’m being 100% personal on this one), it pisses me off. And I posted about this (with Scoble agreeing) about a year ago.

Now finally, someone has the ability to actually twist the screws of DEMO - and I’m glad it was my friend Mike. Techcrunch20 will be happening in the fall, and although numbers will be restricted, you won’t have to pay a dime to show. Mike is teaming up with Calacanis to organize the conference, and more details will be out soon. But all this quick post to say: at long last - best of luck, guys.