Lecture 4 - Blogs: the good, the bad and the corporate injunction dodging powers

Its that time of week again, and this week blogs come under the spot light - also super injunctions....

Blogs. Awesome things they are; easily searchable, debate stimulating and current. But as this weeks lecture revealed, not without their flaws. Largely their flaws relate to trust issues, a blog is not fact checked or reviewed by anyone but its' author - this means that they could say anything with out having used actual sources or facts. Even this and the blogs before it could be a stream of lies, but they're not honest :). This trust issue is not helped by the anominity blog authors have, taking further credibilty away. The second flaw of blogs is the amount of control, techincally, legally and informationally organisations such as governments can have over this suposedly free form of communication. This can be seen in China, where sites and services are blocked by the government restricting users ability to comment freely, http://chinadigitaltimes.net/china/internet-control/ . This can also be seen in Iran during the recent elections, when the government there clamped down on its citizens abilty to communicate with eachother nad the rest of the world technologically. Blogs are also being targeted legally, recently Italy tried to pass a law that would make bloggers forced to register on a national database, and libelous for anything they write - further reducing the freedom the blog embues users with, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/23/italy_blog_law_outrage/. Due to the nature of the blogisphere news travels fast, both true and false - organisations have the potential to plant blogs and spread their own threads and ideas.

All that is very negative regarding the blog, lets not forget bloggings recent defeat of that strange, dark and essential wrong creature the super injunction. A super injunction on toxic waste dumping by oil company Trafigura was violated by bloggers, exposing the practice when conventional media couldn't. In Charlie Brooker's words this was a 'significant victory for freedom of speech' but what else has been hidden by a super injunction?! Its worrying that something like this can exist. Whats equally worrying is the development of 'injunction pr', this can be seen in the Media Guardian (19/10/09) with the recent case of the new Danone yoghurt flavour launch which put an injunction on the story ending up with it getting signicantly more attention. The practice is to be fair genius, but just like the boy who cried wolf abuse of this could result in actually important stories covered by injunctions being over-looked in the future. Anyway enough with the rant, RSS feeds were also mentioned in the lecture,and imporve the blog through the navigation and notification they provide users.

Desite the negative comments about blogs I do believe they are a highly effective amd beneficial tool in todays culture. After all that I think its time to go, come back next week for random e-publishing related blogging :).