In thinking about what happened to Kathy Sierra, there are two issues that I keep coming back to -- one of them is about misogyny online, which Jessica Valenti addresses in both her post here and in her Guardian article. The other issue has to do with how we think about participation in online forums, and to what degree, if any, the owners of forums should be accountable for what participants say.

Chris Locke, who "owned" two blogs that contained death threats against Sierra (including images of her next to a dangling noose, and of her being suffocated with lingerie), defended his policy of not removing anything from his sites with the "YOYOW" (You Own Your Own Words) principle. Eventually, he deleted both sites in their entirety, believing that this was preferable to censoring individual images and comments.

To me, refusing to delete explicit, highly personal death threats because one holds to a Solemn Geek Principle With An Acronym And Everything (SGPWAAAE) seems, at best, rather silly. But it does illuminate the contradictions inherent in notions of how, or even whether, online communities should be managed.

Partly in response to what happened to Sierra, there's been a new round of blogger codes of conduct drafted recently, but even the concept of such a code has been met with derision from the blogosphere, much less actual, draft codes with lines like:

We take responsibility for our own words and for the comments we allow on our blog.

We take responsibility for the comments we allow on our blog? Would it even be possible for Josh Marshall to take responsibility for all the comments on this blog, even if he wanted to?

The "I take responsibility for everything here" approach imagines blog owners as something like publishers, accountable for everything that goes into the book/blog. But blog commentary doesn't work the way traditional paper-based publication works.

Blog comments often exist as part of a direct conversation with other users. There's little in the way of proofreading, copyediting, review, etc. -- certainly not by an editor, and often not by the writer either. In a sense, blog commenters are publishing themselves, albeit inside someone else's blog space. The kind of gatekeeping practiced in traditional paper-based publishing would destroy the interactive, equal access nature of blog communities.

So if you're publishing yourself on someone else's blog, then YOYOW, right? As Chris Locke says:

I will not take responsibility for what someone else said, nor will I censor what another individual wrote.

Sounds good, but... even when someone's posting graphic (not to mention illegal) death threats against an individual? Even when the person posting death threats has owner privileges on your blog? Even when your blog is relatively small, and the images aren't exactly hard to find?

The "I take no responsibility for anything here" approach is more of a speech paradigm, where everybody's just sitting around talking, and there's no way for you to be accountable for, or really do much about, something someone else says. But blog commentary doesn't work the way speech works, either.

For one thing, blog comments, while they may be created off the cuff, are not ephemeral in the same way that speech is. Blog comments, and images, persist until they are deleted. They turn up on Google. They communicate their message over and over again, to anyone who happens to be within message range (including the message "This could happen to you, too").

Most of us grasp this intuitively when we think about a blog owner refusing to delete death threats from a blog. It's one thing to hear someone threaten someone else -- you might respond to it with more speech, you might take some kind of action as a result, but the threatening remark itself vanishes the instant it is spoken. It's another thing to know that there are images on your blog of an individual as the victim of various murder fantasies, and just leave the images there.

Maybe blog owners do have some responsibility for user-created content on their blogs. If Chris Locke's assertion that his choice was between leaving death threats up and deleting the whole site seems ridiculous, maybe it's because we sense that blog owners have some kind of contingent responsibility for content -- at least editorial privilege.

So whaddaya think, is there a way of dealing with the language of online communities that exists somewhere between the speech model and the publication model? What should the social expectations be of a blogger? What about legal responsibilities?