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issues
This page looks at some blogging issues: finding them,
questions of objectivity and defamation, editorial standards,
defamation, censorship, accessibility and long-term access.
It covers -
Identification
One reason for the supposed decline of the genre is the
difficulty of identifying blogs and their content.
Most search engines
don't visit every site each day (the 'latency' for major
engines ranges from three weeks to nine months), don't
index each (or all of every) page and use different criteria
for ranking search results. That means that few blogs
are readily identifiable through traditional engines and
portals.
Identification is accordingly often based on promotional
activity by authors and links from other blog sites -
the 'blogmedia community' is somewhat airless at times.
Blog-specific search engines and directories are also
appearing. The quality of citations on those engines is
uneven. They include
Technorati
- claiming to watch 15,101 blogs and biased towards
the digerati
Blogfinder
- a category-based directory and engine
Tpoowl
- like the "Weblog Madness list of lists"
hasn't been updated since 2000 but of interest as a
snapshot
Blogs
- "The Busy Person's Guide to Blogs", complete
with a "Spellbinding Sites and Sources" page
Blogger
Directory - a directory of member sites searchable
by date, name and keyword
Blogstreet
- clusters similar blogs into a "neighbourhood"
Eatonweb
- a portal of around 7,000 blogs accessible by
name, country, subject and keyword
Daypop
- a "current events search engine" covering
around 7,500 news sites, with a 'Top 40' blog list
Weblogs.com
- features a 'Top 100' links list.
MIT's
Blogdex
lists the most referred-to blogs, crawling the web to
identify pointers and thus determine the most popular.
(The project features an 'all-time' top links list', with
plans for a search facility for bloggers needing to know
"Am I hot, or am I not." Blogdex boasts that it
focuses
on the referential information provided by weblogs,
or the links that people place on their sites. By amalgamating
these pointers, we can get an instantaneous look at
internet fashion from democratic means.
Another
list of the "top weblogs" is the Technorati
Top
100 ranking. Other pointers to blog statistics are
here.
A note on arrangements in some nations for identifying
a blog through an International Standard Serial Number
(ISSN), the journal equivalent of an ISBN, is here.
The Australian National Library's ISSN page is here.
defamation and objectivity
As we've suggested throughout this site, publishing online
does not occur in a legal vacuum.
Defamation action
about statements in blogs published by US authors is underway;
internet service providers and content hosting providers
have also featured in action over alleged defamation or
trade practices offences. Sites such as LiveJournal have
increasingly stressed 'being nice' and offered instructions
for what to do if one member of the online community is
"hateful" to other members, eg makes egregiously
offensive comments, threats or 'stalks' another bloggers.
Scott Rosenberg at a 2002 UC event
on blogging & journalism argued that
blogging is really an online media format, it's really
not a movement. I view it as a form of writing and a
form of media that's native to the Web. Journalists
are already doing things with the weblogging tool that
they wouldn't have thought possible a couple of years
ago. That may be why you had some of that resistance
at first, the sense that it was going to become institutionalized,
and the purist ideal of the blogger as the lone word
slinger, beholden to no one, would be placed in jeopardy.
One of the key issues facing the collision of journalism
and blogging today is the question of editing. Blogging
tools today don't allow for much of an editing process.
Part of what attracts people to blogging is, no one
can tell me what to write. Part of what journalists
uphold as part of their tradition is that more than
one set of eyes reviews materials before it's released
to the public.
Brendan
O'Neill commented
that
If
bloggers want to spend their time fact-checking the
traditional media's ass, that's fine - and some of them
even do it entertainingly. But when that becomes a major
focus of blogging, it hardly points to a 'radical transformation'
of the 'journalistic culture'. Blogs come across less
as a revolutionary vanguard remaking journalism into
something new and dynamic, and more like traditional
journalism's poor cousin - putting it down, picking
holes in its arguments, and generally having a good
old moan about the Fisks and Krugmans of the world.
... if bloggers fancy themselves as cutting-edge 'new
journalists' giving the old media a run for its money,
they'll have to do more than post quickfire comments
in response to already published material or breaking
news or another blogger's comments about another blogger's
comments. Perhaps they could start by generating some
new content.
In
a rare example of historical consciousness he suggests
that
The rise of blogging on the web, and the way in which
it has been hailed as a media revolution not only by
bloggers but also by some newspapers, reflects recent
shifts within journalism itself. In the traditional
media, everywhere from the papers to the TV, there has
been a rise in personal opinions and emotionally responsive
journalism over objectivity and hard-hitting investigation.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with opinion journalism,
especially if the journalist has got something to say.
But too often today, much opinion writing seems to be
driven more by feelings and emotions than by insight
or having a distinct argument to put forward.
Offenses aren't restricted to adults. An educator wrote
in the Washington Post in September 2003 that
blogs, like chat rooms,
are "the
latest sites of Internet cruelty" by children against
children -
Blogs
are cyber reality shows, widely read diaries that publicly
detail the social drama and fluctuating emotions of
young lives. They are often scoured for personal mention,
and they spare no language or feelings ...This isn't
likely to be some child of poverty or deprivation speaking.
Internet bullying involves a population that is largely
middle-class, usually known as the "good kids"
who are "on the right track" or, as many school
personnel told me, "the ones you'd least expect"
to bully or degrade others. The Internet foments outrageous
behavior in part because it is a "gray area"
for social interactions.
... the Internet deletes social inhibitions. "It
allows kids to say and do things that they wouldn't
do face-to-face, and they feel like they won't be held
accountable in the same way. It gives them a false sense
of security and power." The kids themselves agree
... "E-mails are so much less personal ... They're
so much less formal and more indirect, and it's easier
for people to be more candid and even meaner because
of that. People can be as mean and vicious as they want
because they're not directly confronting the person.
It's the same thing as when you're talking on the phone
because you don't have to face the person directly.
This is a step further removed. You don't even have
to hear the person's voice or see their reaction."
The
Post notes that
In
matters of discipline, the proprietary nature of personal
Web pages and blogs is pitting ethics against rights,
or what kids know about bullying against what they know
about personal freedoms of speech and intellectual property.
When a child is reprimanded for negative or hateful
speech on a personal Web page, she may invoke her right
to write what she wants in a semi-private space. And
the parents often go along. ... "Some parents are
so concerned about respecting their children's rights
that they see email as a privacy issue."
When a child is disciplined, the parent has two reactions.
One is, 'Who gave that to you?' And, 'These e-mails
are the private property of my daughter. You can't admit
that evidence into any court.'
censorship and spin
Blogging isn't situated in a historical vacuum and like
other text is potentially subject to censorship
on grounds of offences that encompass obscenity,
secrets or political
subversion.
The boilerplate for most blog hosting services features
restrictions on the inclusion of erotic or other adult
content. So far there has been little coverage of blog
entries (or whole blogs) taken offline at the request
of a service operator or direction from a regulatory agency.
Most media attention has instead centred on
- blogging
as a mechanism for free speech - in particular South
American blogs hosted in the EU or US
- government
use of firewalls to stop citizens using external hosting
to publish potentially dissident blogs, for example
recurrent Chinese government blocks on Blogspot identified
by Ben Edelman and filtering in Iran
-
'insider' accounts such as the 'Baghdad Blogger' Salam
Pax, hyped as "the Anne Frank of the War ...
and its Elvis".
Given
the popularity of the Pax blog (adopted by the UK Guardian)
we can presumably expect to see Wag the Dog style
disinformation blogging - an extension of the growth of
corporate blogs
- in the next war.
privacy and policing
The notion of blogs as samizdat or a photojournalism with
the zeal of the investigative reporter but without the
inhibitions of a 'big media' corporate lawyers means that
video blogging and photoblogs are likely to pose concerns
regarding privacy.
Business writer Bob Parks fretted
about moblogs as an online corporate lynching, offsetting
hype that camera-equipped mobile phones and wireless blogs
will only ever be used against the dark side (real-time
publishing photos of nasties in uniform beating up brave
anti-globalisation protestors or opponents of the PLA).
accessibility
There have been no comprehensive studies regarding the
accessibility of
blogs, ie whether most blogs can be readily navigated
and parsed by readers with visual or other disabilities.
Small-scale testing of major blogs and blog tools suggests
that most blogs are in fact quite unfriendly, failing
to meet WAI standards.
That failure reflects the technology used in some blogging
services. More broadly it may reflect the market for those
services, essentially authors who want to publish online
with a minimum of effort and indeed may not be aware of
concerns about online accessibility or consider that it
is important.
The UK has seen some initiatives in the development of
blogging software that's specifically intended for the
blind: a laudable initiative, since the joys of writing/reading
a blog shouldn't be restricted to the sighted. It is unclear
however whether there is significant uptake of the software
outside the UK.
archiving
In discussing archival
aspects of electronic publishing (and myths
that "everything is online" - and will be accessible
in the future) we have noted the ephemeral nature of much
online content. Ongoing access to many blogs is unlikely.
Some authors have already complained that they have lost
non-current entries - or whole blogs - through technical
failures or the collapse of the entity responsible for
hosting the blog. That is reminiscent of problems encountered
by many owners of personal sites that went offline towards
the end of the dot-com bubble
when an ISP or 'online community' host went out of business
or simply slashed free hosting as part of cost cutting.
Few bloggers appear to be consistently archiving their
content and institutional archiving has favoured celebrities
(particularly those with academic tenure) rather than
less prominent authors.
For some bloggers a concern is likely to be that their
words will indeed be too accessible. The caching of blogs
by search engines, cannibalisation of text by other bloggers
and copying by projects such as the Internet Archive
that aim to capture a slice of the web have the potential
to indefinitely preserve many blogs, with a red face or
two a decade hence. As with postings to newsgroups, old
words will haunt some writers - particularly given the
emphasis on spontaneity and intimacy noted on preceding
pages of this profile.
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