Let me quickly add: I'm _not_ challenging your intuition - on the contrary: I think you are on to something important here. Part of my curiosity stems from the fact that when the AoIR guidelines were developed and approved, blogs were a relatively new phenomenon and we did not have much opportunity to explore the ethical dimensions of this then very new territory. But they clearly evoke important ethical considerations, as these recent postings make clear. And so I'm hoping and hopeful that by teasing out a bit more here, we - and especially the ethics working group - might gain some very helpful insight indeed into some of the issues, possible responses, etc.
ooo, Asa and I had a big debate about this sort of thing on second life research list a while ago. my position is that documents are exempt and openly published, searched/archived blogs are documents, much like architecture and environments in online worlds are documents, much like studying the pen and pencil collection of Charlie would be studying documents. You might need permission of the extant property or copyright holder, but categorically, you are not studying humans or creating subjects. This is similar to places in which you have a right to public photography, you can take pictures of people for research without their permission so long as you are not dealing with those people in any way that intervenes or likely causes any more predictable substantial harm than any other person taking pictures. That is to say that if in your actions, in reading a book or taking a photograph, you are doing it like anyone else and possibly using/ reviewing it for a publication, you are not directly intervening with the author in a harmful manner or in a way that uniquely identifies them in a way that anyone else could not in acting in their normal way have done.