A couple of absurdities have come out of the disgusting attacks against Kathy Sierra.

The first has been silence: active tech blogger Robert Scoble wrote that he was going to take the week off "in support of Kathy [Sierra]". I appreciate the sentiment, but as I posted in Scoble's comments, that is the exact opposite of what he and others should be doing. You don't respond to this sort of thing by shutting up. It's an indication of how disengaged some bloggers are from the political realities of the world that they think that silence is helpful. Usually you don't feed the trolls, but saying nothing, or saying less, is not an effective strategy in this case.

That's why it is so painful to hear that Kathy herself is now is writing about withdrawing from blogging, and is questioning whether she will continue to speak at conferences. I hope that she doesn't give up her voice in the face of this nastiness.

The second absurdity has been Tim O'Reilly's draft Blogger's Code of Conduct. Again, I appreciate the sentiment here, but if such a code had been in place two months ago, when the attacks on Kathy started, what difference would it have made? The vast bulk of bloggers and commenters present at least somewhat civil discourse. That is, they already adhere to the spirit of the Code. The few that don't, the trolls and the sock puppets, won't be following to any rules but their own.

Interest in the Blogger's Code has moved the discussion away from what I think is a more important issue: the vicious misogyny of the attacks on Kathy. The tech "culture" remains male-dominated in a way that many segments of Western society no longer are. That challenge isn't going to be solved by whipping up a set of rules, but we certainly need to start addressing it.