I recently dealt with a similar issue for my dissertation--not blogs, but other ppublicly available information. I worked with a research ethicist on my campus (see http://poynter.indiana.edu/) to address the ethical concerns in a responsible way; I thought the suggestions might be useful for a broader audience here. I interviewed folks involved with, or working for, the federal government about fairly sensitive topics. Several people were concerned about remaining annonymous because our frank discussions could have implications for their current or future jobs, contracts, colleagues, and so on. To address their concerns, I created pseudonyms for each person (even if they did not explicitly ask for confidentiality) and obscured their job titles and agencies/departments to provide further protection. (This approach was approved by my IRB.) My problem was that many respondents had also given Congressional testimony and depositions and conducted interviews with the media; in each of these publicly available instances, their real names were used. I thought I might want to use some quotations from these sources, but it would create a problem with confidentiality. Say I interviewed "Bob" and used this pseudonym to protect his identity, but in another section I used a quotation from "Bob's" Congressional testimony. Any interested party could easily locate "Bob's" testimony online, with his real name, thus breaking his pseudonym and creating the possibility for harmful effects. I could solve the problem by using two different pseudonyms for one individual (one for the interview data and one for the testimony), but that creates additional ethical concerns--now I'm stating/implying that I have data from two different people when there is only one person. To handle this potential problem, I divided my participants into several groups: 1. People who gave an interview but did not have relevant testimony. I used their pseudonyms and did not have an ethical dilemma here. 2. People who gave no interview, but had publicly available testimony. I could use their actual names, because I did not promise confidentiality and their names are already connected to their testimony. 3. People who gave an interview, had relevant testimony, and explicitly asked for anonymity. If I wanted their testimony, I would need to ask them for permission to use their testimony and ask if they wanted two different pseudonyms. I would have to be okay with not using their testimony if they asked me not to use it. 4. People who gave an interview, had relevant testimony, and explicitly said they did not care about anonymity. I should treat this group the same as #3 above, since these respondents may not have considered their public testimony. 5. People who gave an interview, had relevant testimony, and did not make an explicit statement about wanting anonymity. I should treat this group the same as #3 above, since these respondents also may not have considered their public testimony. Essentially, the research ethicist and I determined that the most ethical approach was to clear the use of publicly available testimony/information with my respondents. This would likely result in me being unable to use some testimony, but it was the position with which I was most comfortable. As it turned out, I avoided the ethical problems altogether. Although many interview respondents did have relevant testimony, there was not critical information in the testimony; I was able to successfully build my dissertation without using their testimony. I did use the testimony from two people who did not provide interviews, and in those cases I was comfortable using their real names. To apply my experience to the discussion at hand: interview the bloggers, then determine if you really, really need to quote from their blogs. If you do, then you should ask them how they would like it to be handled. This may not be required by your IRB or dissertation advisors or the AIR community here, but it seems like a reasonable, ethical approach to the problem. -Shannon Shannon M. Oltmann Doctoral Candidate Adjunct Instructor Profile: http://www.slis.indiana.edu/faculty/spotlight/index.php?facid=108 School of Library & Information Science Indiana University