I have been fascinated and a little dismayed at the way this argument has developed and polarised in the last few days. It seems to me that part of the problem is a lack of clarity about what is being argued about. It is important to be clear whether in discussion you are talking about: 1) What is legal to do (and in what country?) 2) What an IRB will allow 3) What is or should be considered ethical. Similarly, and based on my own research, I feel it is important to distinguish between a) What the 'technical' publicness of speech is (ie can the public actually read it) b) The attitudes people 'should' have to what they have written given the technical nature of the medium and c) The attitudes people *actually* have to the publicness of what they have written (which may or may not correspond to the technical characteristics of the actual choice of medium). I don't have enough specialist knowledge to address 1 or 2 but do have a view on 3. To put it more simply and in response to this particular circumstance: In my view, what is important, ethically, in deciding whether asking for permission to use a weblog text is necessary is not whether a web page is actually publicly readable or whether its author is reasonable to expect privacy given their choice of medium, but whether a broader exposure of the text to additional readers (if it is then connectable to its author) is likely to cause the authors significant harm, whether immediate or future, which is likely to be connected to the question whether it seems likely its author envisioned the audience for that page as a private one. I am particularly vexed with the attitude exemplified by Charlie Balch's comment:

As a bottom line, if you post it on the net, it is public. The publisher might regret their post but that does not make it private. Yes, additional exposure might bring some greater harm to the poster but the poster has brought it upon themselves.

Also by Jeremy's:

i expect your mom, like my mom, to be able to become comfortable with blogging over a period of time, to be able to master what skills they desire to have, and from there to make decisions.

The main problem here is often that people who blog don't think through that they have a public private issue to deal with. We have developed rules about what we can and can't use in research based on offline situations that have arisen over centuries and are well understood by all. My feeling (based on my research to date as well as some 20 years of experience online) is that we should be cautious about our use of material that has been posted during this transitional period where the boundaries of public and private online are not widely understood by many participants. In a decade or so when most Internet users are practiced enough to have reached a real understanding of the consequences of expressing one's self online in spaces that are widely accessible and indefinitely archived, we could then consider re-examining our ethical stances. People sometimes make dumb decisions it is true, but as researchers we are bound not to exploit those bad decisions for our own benefit if this is likely to cause them significant harm. Bringing a 'public' text which in practice is very unlikely to be read by significant numbers of people to the attention of a larger or more influential group through publishing it - particularly when such publication comes with a judgement attached - *is* effectively an intervention. Of course you could argue as Charlie does that academic journal readers represent a quite small number of people, and that they are unlikely to have any connection to the research subjects or reason to act on what they have learned about them. This is an argument I have some sympathy with but historically this doesn't seem to weigh strongly in academic decision making. And of course academic research can leak into the broader public discussion - some of us might end up writing newspaper articles that point people to our research (which we might make publicly available on our web pages these days) or we might end up writing 'cross-over' books which talk about our academic work but are aimed at a more general audience. On the other hand if there is significant potential harm to an individual it might be more than compensated for if research gives us important new insights. (Yes I'm a utilitarian). PS Intellagirl wrote:

Has there been any research on what audiences bloggers etc really think they are reaching, want to reach etc? The rift between the the ideal audience and the actual audience?

One of the core aspects of my thesis on personal webloggers will be an examination of just this issue. An early exposition of it is in print but alas only in Norwegian! Here is a selection of other literature on this topic. It is not exhaustive and I would be interested to hear of others' work in this area: Gumbrecht, M. (2004) "Blogs as 'Protected Space'". in World Wide Web Conference, New York, p. 5, http://www.blogpulse.com/papers/ www2004gumbrecht.pdf Nardi, B., D. Schiano and M. Gumbrecht (2004) "Blogging as Social Activity, or, Would You Let 900 Million People Read Your Diary?" in CSCW, p. 11, http://home.comcast.net/~diane.schiano/CSCW04.Blog.pdf boyd, d. (2004) Broken Metaphors: Blogging as Liminal Practice Last accessed: 13 Dec 2004 Last updated: 12 Dec 2004 Address: http:// www.danah.org/papers/BrokenMetaphors.pdf. Viegas, F. (2005) "Bloggers' Expectations of Privacy and Accountability: An Initial Survey ", Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 10 (3). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue3/viegas.html Lenhart, A. and S. Fox (2006) "Bloggers: A Portrait of the Internet’s New Storytellers" Pew Internet & American Life Project http:// www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/186/report_display.asp Norwegian speakers might want to look at: Brake, D. (2007) 'Personlige webloggere og deres publikum: Hvem tror de egentlig at de snakker med?' i Lüders, M., Pritz, L. & Rasmussen, T. (Red.) Personlige medier: Livet mellom skjermene, 141-163. Oslo: Gyldendal. I have (the original) English language version, "Personal webloggers and their audiences: Who do they think they are talking to?" and will share it on request (though there is much I would change with it now). --- David Brake, Doctoral Student in Media and Communications, London School of Economics & Political Science <http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/study/ mPhilPhDMediaAndCommunications.htm> Also see http://davidbrake.org/ (home page), http://blog.org/ (personal weblog) and http://get.to/lseblog (academic groupblog) Author of Dealing With E-Mail - <http://davidbrake.org/ dealingwithemail/> callto://DavidBrake (Skype.com's Instant Messenger and net phone) Please access the attached hyperlink for an important electronic communications disclaimer: http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/secretariat/legal/disclaimer.htm