Items of interest this week:
Blogged Out of a Job; Few Firms Have Rules but Posters Be Warned, Amy Joyce, The Washington Post, February 19, 2006.
A reporter in Dover, Del., was fired earlier this month for offensive postings on his personal blog. The number of bloggers continues to grow, but the number of workplace policies explaining the company’s rules on blogging remains anemic. And that can cause a lot of workplace angst for both management and workers.
Activists turn to blogs for war news, Leigh Shelton, The Daily Reveille (LSU), February 14, 2006.
Recent Internet research shows blog readership jumped 58 percent in 2004, and blog readers find personal publishers, or “bloggers,” to be much more credible than traditional journalists. The Iraq war debate between anti-war protester Cindy Sheehan and U.S. Marine Lt. Col. David Couvillon that occurred in Baton Rouge, La., drew, among others, a small group of war-supporting mothers and anti-war organizers with seemingly nothing in common except that they said they look to alternative forms of media, particularly Internet blogs, to get their news.
That Which We Call a Blog, DAN MITCHELL, February 18, 2006.
The rise of blogging is often cast in black-and-white terms: blogs versus the the mainstream media. But as blogs become more popular, it’s becoming hard to tell what is a blog and what is mainstream media. Mr. Sifry calls Boingboing a blog — and so it is. But it also does some original reporting, and has professional journalists on its staff. And oddly, Mr. Sifry calls Slashdot (slashdot.com), a technology site with material created mostly by users, a mainstream site.Meanwhile, more and more mainstream media sites are blogging. In the end, users are most likely drawn to sites for the quality and trustworthiness of the material presented.
Russian blog closed for publishing prophet Muhammad cartoons, Web Planet, Feder Smirnov, February 20, 2006.
An echo of the prophet Muhammad cartoon scandal reached Russian blogosphere. Russia’s Internet providing company Majordomo closed a news blog for depicting Prophet Muhammad’s cartoons. On Feb. 16, 2006, the editor of a Russian blog called BitchX received a letter from the technical director of the Internet providing company saying that the carton was temporarily taken off his blog due to an “earnest request of the Government.” The blogger did not agree with this solution. As a result, his blogging account was blocked and the editor lost any access to information posted on his blog.
Originally posted March 7, 2006 at PolicyByBlog