Tim O’Reilly’s draft Blogging Code of Conduct may be causing a bigger stir online than the caustic and misogynistic comments that sparked it. The blogosphere, critics say, "don’t need no stinking badges."

Though it sometimes seems that way. Mr O’Reilly’s proposed code followed last month’s well-publicised (and horrible) death threats against Kathy Sierra, publisher of the popular Creating Passionate Users blog. Calls for higher standards and plain old civility and justice resounded after Ms Sierra responded to the threats with an impassioned post describing her ordeal.

Unfortunately for all of those who yearn for more civility in our public discourse, any attempt to enforce higher standards - through a blogger "code of conduct" or otherwise - is almost certainly bound to fail.

That courteous people should not tolerate rude, libelous or threatening blog entries or comments is obvious, and hardly needs to be codified. Trolls who make death threats are bound not to heed such a code anyway.

Blogging’s great innovation was to lower the cost of web-publishing to next to nothing. This upside of this is that, in the blogosphere, anyone with a good idea or insight can put it online and get it noticed. The inescapable downside is that those who wish to threaten, mislead or titillate have the same opportunity.

MySpace’s decision to block some content from Photobucket today has brought out the predictable rhetoric.

Photobucket calls it an attack on freedom of expression. MySpace says it is just trying to stop nakedly commercial excercises that ruin its users’ experience.

The more interesting long-term question, though, is one of business (and technology) strategy: does News Corp truly want MySpace to be an open platform? It says it does: you can embed anything on your MySpace page, as long as it meets certain rules (it can’t be commercial, violate someone else’s copyright, or breach safety and security.)

What use is an open platform, though, if no one else can make money from it? Imagine if Microsoft had decided that it was fine for other software developers to write software that runs on Windows, but they couldn’t sell their wares. Google doesn’t limit its Google Maps API to non-commercial uses only. Who is going to innovate on MySpace if News Corp gets to keep all the profits?

Naturally, any number of Web 2.0 start-ups (and their financial backers) are desperate to get access to the MySpace community. This is Mitchell Kertzman of Hummer Winblad (whose investments include Widgetbox, a directory of application widgets that you can embed on other web pages):

In general, successful platforms allow an ecosystem of partners to make money on the platform - MySpace seems less interested in that. They have a tremendous franchise, but it may be an opportunity for competitors to gain share by offering a more partner-friendly ecosystem.

If it so chooses, it’s fine for MySpace to operate as a closed system - that’s the route Apple has chosen with iTunes. But if it truly wants to be open, it needs to come up with a better proposition for third-party websites. A willingness to negotiate ad-sharing deals would be a start. It also needs to be much clearer about how it interprets its highly opaque "non-commercial" rule.

More bad news for the "Tech is Different" crowd. Seems that the typical small tech company has been less vulnerable to default than other companies with similar financial profiles - until now.

In a report today, credit rating agency S&P puts the favourable historic pattern down to a couple of things. Small (junk-rated) tech companies tended to get acquired more than those in other sectors. They also benefitted from cheap finance in the form of convertible debt (a function of the sky-high expectations often built into share prices.)

Both those factors have been going away since the end of the bubble, says S&P - a result of what it calls the "maturing" of the industry. Bank loans and other forms of straight debt are becoming more common, and leveraged buy-out firms are competing for acquisitions. Higher default rates will be a natural result.

Of course, you could turn this on its head. As leverage rises, equity investors should see higher returns. It’s not all bad news - but it’s another sign of how the pressures on tech companies to drop their traditional financial conservatism are making them more similar to those in other industries.

Before Google ran into trouble with TV companies over YouTube and with authors and publishers over Google Print, there was Google News.

Its aggregation of links to newspaper content and wire agency copy is now five years old, but two years ago the Agence France-Presse news agency sought damages of $17.5m from Google in a breach of copyright lawsuit.

AFP held a minority view among Google’s 4,500 news sources that the thumbnail photos and paragraph excerpts that linked to its content on the web were bad for business.

Nearly everyone else appeared to see a benefit to the biggest site on the internet linking to their content, driving traffic to their sites and earning them money from the ads they were able to display alongside their stories.

Google itself has yet to directly profit from the service – there are still no ads on the Google News pages.

AFP announced today it had settled with Google and would allow its content to be used, but the news came only hours after a new challenge emerged.

Speaking at Stanford University on Thursday night, Sam Zell, the new owner of the Tribune media conglomerate, said:

"If all the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content for nothing, what would Google do? We have a situation today where effectively the content is being paid for by the newspapers and stolen by Google, etcetera. That can last for a short time, but it can’t last forever. I think Google and the boys understand that. We’re going to see new deals and new formulas in the media space that reflect the reality of cost benefit.”

Mr Zell is a billionaire from real estate who has been in newspapers for less than a week. His comments may seem naïve but they may also hint at radical moves to come.

Already fighting on two media fronts, Google could face a third being opened anew.

The best way to guess what Chinese internet search leader Baidu.com is going to do next has always been to look at what Google is already doing - but until now email has been an exception.

That could be changing. In his blog (in Chinese) founder and CEO Robin Li has been musing aloud about the failings of Microsoft’s Outlook email programme, and hinting that Baidu could do better. Indeed, it seems the Chinese company might go bigger in terms of online email storage even than Google’s Gmail, which currently offers this correspondent 2,836MB.

"If Baidu did email, we would have to offer unlimited capacity," Mr Li writes.

Baidu certainly has a market opportunity, since Google is reluctant to set up a local Gmail service out of concern about the degree to which it would have to cooperate with the security forces and censors of China’s Communist government. Chinese can sign up to use overseas servers, but the government’s "Great Firewall" can also make it hard to access some messages. Baidu, by contrast, is happy to censor its content and could expect a supportive government attitude.

Is Silicon Valley’s silicon shortage about to slacken?

An annual whinge-fest, for suppliers and customers for the scarce polysilicon raw material that powers the chip and solar panel industries, actually contained some good news this week.

The Solar Silicon Conference in Munich heard plans from established suppliers and new entrants to add substantial additional capacity. While 40,000 metric tonnes of polysilicon were produced in 2006, this figure is expected to treble to 120,000 in 2010.

Hemlock, the leading producer, said it would double its own capacity between 2010 and 2012, although it went on to say it had already pre-sold this extra capacity.

That gives you some idea of the demand for polysilicon, particularly from the solar panel industry. Semiconductor makers have had stable long-term fixed-price contracts. Their needs for their ever-smaller chips are more modest than the new kids on the chip blocks responsible for the fast growing acreage of solar panels.

Merrill Lynch, in a report on silicon wafer provider MEMC, says solar-cell makers are adding capacity at a faster rate than facilities for the raw material are being added.

It says new entrants will probably struggle to produce polysilicon on time and within budget and predicts a tight market for years to come.

Video game publishers seem intent on rocking your world.

In a clear attempt to one-up Activision’s success with Guitar Hero, Electronic Arts has announced it will launch the Rock Band game on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles this November.

Guitar Hero features a plastic guitar accessory that has buttons in place of frets. Gamers can strum with one hand and play the frets with the other while trying to play an on-screen score accurately.

It has sold over 2m copies and boosted Activision’s results in the last holiday season after it acquired Guitar Hero’s publisher Red Octane.

Guitar Hero’s developer is Harmonix, which is partnering with MTV and EA on the new Rock Band game. Players will be able to choose from drum, bass guitar, lead guitar and microphone peripherals and the music they will be playing along to will feature master recordings rather than cover versions of songs like Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Free Bird.  

The official announcement does not mention any online element to the game but this seems sure to be part of it. This would mirror a trend of musicians collaborating online including contributing different parts of songs to sites such as YouTube.

It also follows on from the success of karaoke and dancing video games. In February, EA bought SingShot Media, an online karaoke website it plans to integrate into a number of its online services.

Rock Band is yet another riff on music in games for EA – it announced last month  it was setting up its own real-world record label – Artwerk – and would launch Boogie -a dancing game that would take advantage of the Nintendo Wii’s motion-sensing controller.

Lest it be completely overshadowed by news of Brussels’s antitrust charges against Apple (subscription link), here are three implications of today’s deal between Apple and EMI to offer DRM-free downloads from iTunes.

1. This deal moves Apple to the forefront of interoperability. With today’s announcement, the burden of making music interoperable with different devices will now fall on big music companies, and not on Apple. Steve Jobs appears to have spiked the guns of European consumer groups who have been targeting Apple, arguing that its closed iTunes system is unfairly ties consumers to the company’s iPod music player.

2. The pricing of DRM-free songs on iTunes could drive album sales.  While higher-quality DRM-free songs will cost about 30 cents more per download under the Apple-EMI agreement, our understanding is that this premium does not apply to entire albums. The narrower price gap between singles and entire albums should help drive album sales - an ‘upsell’ that the music industry has been trying to encourage. Any pickup in album sales would be particularly beneficial to EMI, which is financially the weakest of the big music groups.

3. Apple isn’t out of the woods yet.  Today’s antitrust charges allege that Apple and big record companies have engaged in anticompetitive practices by prohibiting users in one EU country from downloading music from an iTunes store intended to serve another country. The charges indicate that, mistakenly or not, Europe is willing to take on what it perceives as iTunes’s unhealthy grip on the digital download market on multiple fronts.