Or not. We built a blog in Wordpress, and then started blogging. No training. No new infrastructure. No barriers at all really.

And we’re clearly not alone. Technorati was tracking 113 million blogs the last time somebody updated the wikipedia page about it in June 2008. Most of those blogs don’t amount to much (and many of their authors have moved on to telling us about their lunch via twitter) – but some do.

Take David Farrar’s Kiwiblog for example (I’m sure he won’t mind). It gets about 1 million page views a month. That’s not insignificant. In fact, I’ll wager that makes it a more influential information source than a great number of New Zealand’s traditional news sources.

With that power comes responsibility  – and liability. Bloggers are subject to defamation laws - so they can’t just write anything about anybody. However, defamation actions are expensive. Whereas once you would have been taking defamation action against a media company with significant financial assets – you’d be lucky to recoup your legal costs from most bloggers. 

Judging by what I’ve seen on some blogs recently, not all bloggers are aware of the possibility of defamation – or concerned about it.

Media literacy is an important cybersafety skill.  Media Literacy has always been important – but it is even more so in the digital age. As people quickly scan through small packets of information, it gets harder and harder to qualify the validity of claims, discern impartial from opinionated, or the truth from the spin. Some bloggers are very open about their personal or political positions. Take David Farrar’s disclosure statement for example. That’s helpful. Some aren’t. That’s not.

 Bloggers often hold themselves up as citizen journalists – the purest implementation of the fourth estate. “We hold the politicians and mainstream media to account” they say. But in truth, many of them are guerrilla marketing for political or social ideologies.  

Sure, we could invest in digital media literacy training for all New Zealander’s (and we should) but that will take time. In the meantime, I’ve got a couple of other ideas.

1) A Blogging Standards Authority. Somebody I can complain to about blog content. Somebody with some ability to take action – quickly and at low cost to me. I don’t want to go to court and sue for big money. I just want to be able to protect my reputation. Even baseless nonsense can cast a long digital shadow.  

2) A Bloggers code of practice. Something to insure some minimum level of professionalism. I’m not saying that the code would make every blogger into a quality citizen journalist – but it might help people discern those that are from those that aren’t. Maybe Bloggers could chose to be a member of the ‘NZ Bloggers Collective’ and adhere to the code – or not.  

And that is my blog about blogs.