Last weekend, the SXSW-meets-Bonnaroo-meets-a-Sample-Sale of the female blogosphere happened: BlogHer ’09. BlogHer, simply stated in their tagline, is a “Community for Women Who Blog.” More thoroughly explained, BlogHer is:
“Founded in February 2005 as a labor of love by three bloggers, BlogHer’s mission is to create opportunities for women who blog to pursue exposure, education, community and economic empowerment. Today BlogHer is the leading participatory news, entertainment and information network for women online, reaching more than 14 million women each month via annual conferences, a Web hub (http://www.blogher.com), and an publishing network of more than 2,500 qualified, contextually targeted blog affiliates (http://blogherads.com). BlogHer Inc. is run by its three co-founders and has backing from Venrock, the Peacock Fund and Azure Capital Partners.
Colloquially defined, super-blogger (and, coincidentally, frequent giveaway-er) MizFit describes the conference as: “The blogger mayhem that was Chicago.” What’s the big deal about all this, you potentially-non-blogger types ask?
Well, the Responsibility Project, created by Liberty Mutual, did a survey at BlogHer of many of today’s top-ranked bloggers that focused on accountability and responsibility in blogging. (The Responsibility Project aims to be a catalyst for examining the decisions that confront people trying to “do the right thing.”)
175 bloggers were surveyed. They said:
98% of surveyed bloggers believe it is acceptable to receive a free product
87% of surveyed bloggers believe it is okay to write company-sponsored posts
A majority of bloggers mentioned transparency, disclosure and honesty as key caveats to receiving free product and writing sponsored posts
84 percent said honesty is a key trait of a responsible blogger, followed by transparency (66 percent) and reliable sources (56 percent)
And here is a link to more information, including video interviews of bloggers who participated in the survey: http://www.responsibilityproject.com/blogher_mmr/
As a part of the overall discourse about what on earth to do with blogger ethics (first addressed by me here, remember me scoffing at the FTC trying to regulate bloggers?), this survey is interesting and important.
But as a part of the overall picture of bloggers, I’m not sure that this survey really even matters. I think the numbers are misleading. They surveyed all women, all at a conference about blogging. These aren’t the armchair quarterbacks of the blogging field, these are the marquee names, the involved and active bloggers who were either invited to present a panel or chose to pay $400 for a pass to the conference. As an example, one of the featured videos is from a General Motors blogger. Of course she believes in responsibility and accountability–her company has TRAINED her, as one of their bloggers, to do so–to mind her manners, so to speak. That isn’t to say that she wouldn’t have an internal sense of ethics, but it is to say that she couldn’t have used manners she never learned. And that she isn’t really a fair survey respondent.
The FTC proposed guidelines to address the people that aren’t getting trained, that don’t have a clue about journalistic ethics let alone blogging ethics, that are just writing because they want to and writing about something they got for free because they got it for free. It’s not even necessarily that they’re irresponsible as much as that they’re ignorant–literally, uneducated. So surveying the trained, the Brett Farves (finally retiring for good?) of blogging, is like asking Farve is passing is easy. Of course it is. He’s been doing it all his life.
So I’m back to my original stance: proposed guidelines make sense as a model for education but make absolutely no sense as a vehicle for enforcement. So whatever money is to be spent “enforcing” is much better spent educating. That is, creating a sense of responsibility in people who don’t even know that they’re supposed to have one about this particular topic.
Disclaimer: Liberty Mutual sent me the information about their survey.