UK Book Bloggers - Your Thoughts Needed For New Charter

Since Kristi of The Story Siren created her Privacy Policy, a few people have been doing the same as it's a good idea. Me included. But some British bloggers want to take the Privacy Policy idea further to protect bloggers as well as the followers. Becky of The Bookette is heading the idea to create a Charter for UK bloggers, and I'm putting the information out to you to ask fellow bloggers from the UK to get involved, and try to come up with some ideas. Here's what Becky sent to me:

So far the idea is that we will structure a charter that UK book bloggers can sign up to. I feel quite strongly that we should not encourage minors to give out their home address when they are the winners of competitions. All we need is one rogue person posing at a book blogger to harm the reputation of all our blogs.

I suggest that part of the Charter would be that under 16s must provide their school address** and a care of name or their parent or guardian's work address to receive contest prizes. Then when we send books out, we could enclose a standard letter which explains why we do this and then we are part of the Charter.

Also, I think it would list key points for minors to look out for when viewing a blog to see if it's genuine. Bloggers who sign up to the Charter would need to make sure they had those things on their blog. No idea what they would be yet..any ideas gratefully received.

And of course we could design a logo for the Charter.

So these are my initial thoughts. I love to hear what you think. As I haven't been blogging for very long, I could really do with some input from experienced bloggers about the practical aspects of how this could work and other things the Charter could include, what it would be called etc.

**There has been further discussion, and Becky has told me she was informed that minors shouldn't give out their school addresses either, so stated by Barnardos. So this is still being worked on.

Once the Charter has a name, a blog will be created as a sound board for ideas to be shared, and to host the Charter once it's working. I think this is a pretty awesome idea, and encourage any UK bloggers to please either comment on this blog, or email Becky at thebookette[at]googlemail[dot]com if you have any thoughts or ideas. This could be something important for us all.