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Saturday, February 19, 2005
For Bloggers Only
Got an e-mail from Andy Koh at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore) about a survey on blogging and ethics:
I am an undergraduate from the School of Communications and Information, Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). Previously, my fellow course-mates and I have sent you an e-mail regarding our online survey to study the practices and attitudes of bloggers on ethics. This study is conducted as part of our honours thesis.
We have retrieved your e-mail address from your weblog which was, in turn, selected using random weblog generating services freely available on the Internet.
Your participation in this survey is voluntary and should take no longer than 20 minutes to complete. All information will be kept confidential. We really appreciate if you can take some time off to participate in our survey.
It's a bit clunky and as with most surveys, the questions are annoyingly vague or restricting. But hey, if you have the time, it might be interesting to see what comes of it all. 'specially given all the sound and fury from the BloJoWebCredThing last month.
ntodd
February 19, 2005 | Permalink
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Comments
hey ntodd- remember that it's an undergrad project, and probably won't generate too much of anything except some grades for some students. that said, i think you should do it, and honor any other requests you receive. i think what is particularly important is that the school isn't in the US, which tells you a lot about the difference between media studies here and there.
Posted by: chicago dyke | Feb 19, 2005 1:38:52 PM
what chicago dyke said. I agree.
Posted by: oldwhitelady | Feb 19, 2005 4:22:24 PM
I took the survey and what is clear to me is that they were operating out of the metaphor that blogging is journalism. If you were NOT operating out of that metaphor your response to questions would really throw off the results.
For example I create fictional characters in my blog (Hello, Spocko is a fictional character) but that doesn't matter if it is an entertaining post. If I created a fictional character as part of a "news" story that would be a different matter.
Plus how I talk about the people I write about depends on WHO I'm writing about. If I think that Jeff Gannon has made his private life public then I'm not concerned that I revealed that info to a wider audience. But I'm not going to "out" my neighbor who is minding his own business.
It is the difference between public figures and private individuals.
Like the BloJoWebcredthing people who try and cram an overall metaphor on an easy publishing format are missing the point. It's like saying.
"I noticed you use a pen and write on paper and then put that paper on a tree outside your house for people walking by to read. I will now call you a journalist."
"But I'm a poet!" you protest
"No you are a journalist because you used the format of putting words on paper and displaying them to people."
"But my intention was to put words on paper to express my thoughts."
"Sorry, a majority of people are using these words on paper like journalists do; therefore we will evaluate your poems as if they are articles written by journalists."
See how silly that is? There can be blogs that are like newspapers and blogs that are like opinion pieces and blogs that worship Alizee the French singer. They all simply share a publishing format. Unless you claim you are a specific kind of blog and then you are stating to the world were you are coming from. At that point people still have few ways to know your credibility until you prove it for a while and even then unless you submit to outside, third party checks and balances it is hard for people to truly trust you. As we know the checks and balances for some journalists are very weak or non-existent. And since the removal of the fairness doctrine by Reagan in the 1980's there is even less of a drive to provide any outside imposed balance beyond "the invisible hand of the marketplace".
I've said this before and I'll say it again. The thing that will mess up the blogs will be when the marketing people and PR people start using them heavily to create "buzz" for products. The political people did it for the various campaigns because it is VERY easy to do. Their are virtually no barriers for some company to pay a bunch of people (or even a few people) to create astroturf blogs to promote products and services.
Some will do a good job of it, some will be ham handed. Some will be caught and then the whole issue of "can you trust bloggers?" will be raised again.
You read it hear first! Okay, first on MY web page. Okay I'm sure others have said this, but I said it best. Well maybe not BEST, but most recent. (Wow that survey really got to me.)
Posted by: spocko | Feb 19, 2005 4:48:11 PM
There was some effort to differentiate blogs into various categories, but the problem is that most blogs are a mix of different elements.
Kevin Drum has a good gig as a political blogger, but his claim to fame is Friday Cat Blogging, something he no longer does.
Steve Gilliard may follow a post about Colonialism with a recipe or Manchester United gossip.
NTodd goes in so many directions, that this is more of a conversation than a blog, which is great.
This is one of the problems with awards: how can people be classified? We don't have the "metrics".
Posted by: Bryan | Feb 20, 2005 1:06:22 AM
cd, owl - yeah, I had filled out the survey. There's actually 2, but I was not in the right frame of mind for the 2nd one, which asked all sorts of ethical scenario questions (if Heinz can't afford the medicine to save his wife's life, should he steal it?).
spocko - totally. I was especially annoyed by the questions about fictional characters. I invent them all the time when I'm doing parody stuff. It was clearly geared toward blogger = journo. I was hoping they'd have a comment section at the end where I could point that out, but noooo...
Bryan - I would classify this blog as having ADD, just like its owner.
Posted by: NTodd | Feb 20, 2005 10:59:19 AM
Buy me stuff off my 
