A few years ago, Tim O’Reilly kicked off a bit of a firestorm when he suggested that there should be a blogger code of conduct and offered some helpful suggestions for items that might appear in that code. Not everyone agreed that blogging needed anything of the sort, and each of the proposed items attracted its own bit of criticism. The lack of agreement on a formal code (or even on whether such a thing should exist), however, doesn’t necessarily mean that bloggers haven’t adopted some form of informal behavioral standards. A survey of over 1,000 bloggers performed by researchers from Singapore suggests that informal codes do exist, despite the fact that bloggers themselves don’t see accountability as a major goal.

The primary hurdle for the authors was simply obtaining a survey population. Blogs tend to get abandoned with disturbing regularity, so the authors relied on blog aggregators to limit themselves to a blogger population with regular output. They did, however, exclude contributors to multiauthor blogs, which may have limited the influence of some of the most popular blogs out there. The authors also performed separate analyses on blogs that focused on personal matters (they had about 900 of these) and those that focused on issues like politics or news (another 330 blogs). To an extent, this bias might have been self-selected: if someone got into blogging to talk about themselves, it seems you might expect them to be more likely to take a survey about themselves, as well.

Click here to read the rest of this article

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica