Yesterday’s post started a whole train of thoughts about the concept of blog integrity and why should we care? I am sure it’s the idealist in me that is attaching a great deal of importance to the billions of words blogged on a daily basis. Perhaps I shouldn’t care because the power of blog-space is that people write opinions and thoughts in a way that they want to. It’s not for anybody else to say that I shouldn’t be allowed to promote a new mobile ‘phone because either I want to or the company sent me a free ‘phone.
I believe I might be attaching a purity to the weblog concept that is misplaced. I wouldn’t place those same ideals on the population as a whole, so why should I do it to the blogged world? Freedom to write whatever I want is a fine thing, and perhaps I am imposing concepts of integrity that are incompatible with this freedom?
I’m not sure where these thoughts are going, but they are challenging my blog ideals. I mentioned in one of my posts yesterday to the UK Bloggers list that, perhaps, blogs were just catching up with other media. I suspect that is true, but in a way I hadn’t thought of – the fact that they are as exploitable, commercially, as any other media.
Where does this leave my online ideals?
In related reading, Rebecca Blood talks about these issues in Weblog Ethics.