As a follow-up to Dan's message - as far as ethical issues in general, I'd recommend the AoIR ethics guidelines (www.aoir.org/reports/ethics.pdf) as a series of questions that have now proven helpful to researchers around the world in determining just what the ethical issues of a given project / approach / methodology, etc., might be. In addition, if your research is going to involve anyone from the European Union, you should be aware (if you're not already) that the data privacy protection laws for the E.U. states are considerably stricter in a number of ways than those enforced in the U.S. For a comprehensive overview of E.U. data privacy law and correlative steps for researchers, the materials gathered at the RESPECT project website are the best I've seen (though Dan certainly knows better than I on this): http://www.respectproject.org/main/index.php following especially the link http://www.respectproject.org/main/data.php which introduces the research and final report of colleagues at the Centre de Recherches Informatique et Droit (CRID) / The Research Centre for Computer and Law at the University of Namur. The Code of Ethics for Socio-Economic Research, at http://www.respectproject.org/ethics/ethics.pdf is also absolutely first rate. Enjoy! Charles Ess Distinguished Research Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies Drury University 900 N. Benton Ave. Springfield, MO 65802 USA voice: 417-873-7230 fax: 417-873-7435 homepage: <www.drury.edu/ess/ess.html> Co-chair, CATaC '04: <it.murdoch.edu.au/catac> Exemplary persons seek harmony, not identity - Confucius ----- Original Message ----- From: "Dan L Burk" <burkx006@umn.edu> To: <air-l@aoir.org> Sent: Sunday, January 18, 2004 5:18 PM Subject: Re: [Air-l] On Netnography

This is a very interesting service. I hope that you've engaged good

counsel

and/or have excellent business liability insurance -- aside from the data privacy issues raised by your activity, you appear to have massive copyright, trespass, and unauthorized access issues, across multiple jurisdictions. Lots of exposure, not easy to sort out the sources of liability. (And I'm not even going to mention all the ethical issues -- Charles Ess or somebody else can do that.) Should be plenty to keep you on your toes.

Best of luck,

Dan L. Burk Oppenheimer, Wolff & Donnelly Professor University of Minnesota Law School 229 19th Avenue South Minneapolis, MN 55455 USA *************************************** Voice: 612-626-8726 Fax: 612-625-2011

On 18 Jan 2004, Fernando Polo wrote:

...

Dear all,

Our company has recently launched a service to discover online consumer insights from discussions held in Internet (newsgroups, message boards, etc). We use our proprietary technology to crawl the web, store and text mine the contents, and visualise the outcome (everything in real-time), combined with analysis provided by a team of sociologists.

We have heard of some companies using ethnography and even netnography (or cyber ethnography), and we have gone through research by R. Kozinets, and some other forerunners, but I would appreciate very much if you can provide me with more case studies or citations of firms using this methodology.

If you want to receive more information about our service, just send me a mail.

Thank you all in advance. Fernando Polo

_____________________________ www.dicelared.com Tel/Fax +34 914 453 721 fernando.polo@dicelared.com _________________________

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