Our IRB here (Indiana University) has taken the stance, with some coaxing from us, of considering weblogs public information - and thus not requiring any anonymization whatsoever. You should probably be prepared to fend off an angry message or two from bloggers who do not appreciate that you're using their blog in your research; people will probably figure out that something's going on from reading their referer logs. If you think that it would help, I think we could probably share the language we used in our last IRB applications in order to address just this issue. My personal understanding of the situation is that the information is public, but that you should certainly treat individuals with as much care and as ethically as possible. For our purposes (largely examination of genre characteristics and coding of features) the characteristics of individuals do not often seem to pose a problem, but for many types of study (for example, a piece of research that discusses blogging about sexual orientation or drug use) there may be repercussions for the studied blogger that need to be taken into very careful consideration. --elijah IU SLIS / Blog Research on Genre project http://www.blogninja.com
I am now in the middle of filling out an IRB form for research that I intend to do on blogging practices, and it seems that any research done on "human subjects" must keep personally identifying information confidential. This is a difficult issue, since one's username and blog title would identify an individual, but they may also be understood as published/public information. If anyone has encountered a similar situation and can advise as to how I should proceed or who can offer research references that deal with this issue, that would be much appreciated.
Take care, Oriana Gatta Women's Studies M.A. candidate Georgia State University