A year ago in Paris, the setting of so many heady philosophical debates through the ages, a young American entrepreneur stood up and challenged a crowd of technology advocates with the question, "Is civility dead?" Her audience squirmed. Others roared their objections. One spiky-haired Brit challenged the speaker. "This is bulls**t!,"he exclaimed, a reminder, in case we needed it, that we were not on the Left Bank.

Actually, we were in the basement auditorium of a corporate bubble in the shadows of La Defensé. The debate was supposed to be about new tools for bloggers, but we had veered into a minefield. An American was asking her fellow bloggers from across the planet to consider: "Is it possible to be nicer to one another?"

That fiery question, as many bloggers know, was uttered by Mena Trott, co-founder of the blogging software company Six Apart. That four-letter-word – nice – was now on the table for the world’s bloggers to consider. Trott wanted her fellow bloggers to consider the impact of using one’s trusty blog as a bully pulpit to unleash a vicious assault on an unsuspecting target. Nah, nice is no fun, was the consensus conclusion that day. And so the first attempt to disarm some of the blogosphere’s most combative voices was a dud. The debate raged for a few weeks in the echo chamber that is the blogosphere and then fizzled out.

I spoke to Trott this week about the incident. She has no regrets about triggering the debate, she said, even if nothing was resolved. Well, she added, maybe she has one regret. She would have preferred she used the occasion to discuss accountability in the blogosphere, not that four-letter word. She also admitted wishing that she never called the spiky-haired guy an asshole, but what she was really kicking herself over was the other A-word, accountability.

Trott has an interesting golden rule that she would like to see bloggers adopt. "If you aren’t going to say something directly to someone’s face, than don’t use online as an opportunity to say it," she says. "It is this sense of bravery that people get when they are anonymous that gives the blogosphere a bad reputation."

This credo, she believes, is essential to the future growth of blogging, (not that there is any risk at the moment – 100,000 new blogs, some of them actually created by non-spammers, are incubated daily). Newcomers would hardly want to share their observations and unburden their souls in an environment where there is an unmistakable element of high-fiving, spitball-shooting and navel-gazing, as practised by the first generation of bloggers.

The next generation – Trott thinks of them as "moms, dads and friends", people who read blogs and have something timely to say, but may not have an agenda like say toppling the government or taking down a CEO – will have a more folksy influence. There will still be the look-at-me blogs and there will always be a cabal of A-listers, the most-read. But newcomers will upset the balance of power simply because they don’t know who the A-listers are, and really couldn’t care less. It’s a sheer numbers game, goes the thinking. If the mainstream starts blogging, then the established blogs today (think blogs obsessed with gadgets or video games or vintage cars) will become, as they are offline, niche and perhaps, gasp, marginal.

What Trott envisages is accountability being forced upon the blogosphere, not by the nice police, but by newbie bloggers for whom nice comes naturally. Of course, such a view suits Six Apart’s aspirations for its newest blog publishing software tool, Vox (http://www.sixapart.com/vox/invite.html). Marketed as "blogging for the rest of us", Vox has an unapologetic newby feel, designed with un-intimidating features such as a privacy function to ensure posts can be read on an invite-only basis.

Trott says the fall-out from her nice ultimatum had an impact on the final design elements of Vox. "It’s helped us cement what we want to do with Vox," she says.

"It’s okay to create a place for people that are nice and who care about what they have to say," she continues, adopting the tone of a protective mother.

Next week, Trott is back to Paris, the site of the Six Apart-sponsored Le Web 3 conference (http://www.leweb3.com/). And yes, she intends to address the A-word again – "accountability", not the other one. "I have to address it. It will be the elephant in the room otherwise," she says. "I just want people to, as clichéd as it sounds, get along."

A business is riding on it.

Bernhard Warner, formerly Reuters' internet correspondent in Europe and senior editor for The Industry Standard Europe, writes about technology, the internet and media industries. He can be reached at techscribe@gmail.com