{"id":420,"date":"2007-03-30T15:45:56","date_gmt":"2007-03-30T14:45:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=420"},"modified":"2007-03-30T15:45:56","modified_gmt":"2007-03-30T14:45:56","slug":"blogging-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=420","title":{"rendered":"Blogging: the good, the bad and the ugly"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As will be evident from NightHawk, I&#8217;m a big fan of blogging &#8211; but the blogosphere is a problematic space.<br \/>\nFirstly, it is not unknown for bloggers to be dismissed by their employers because they blog. But the good news is that one such blogger has just won a court case in which her employer was found to have acted illegally in dismissing her. Catherine Sanderson was dismissed from her job as a secretary with the Paris branch of British accountancy firm Dixon Wilson last summer after bosses discovered <a href=\"http:\/\/petiteanglaise.com\/\">her popular blog<\/a>. You can read more about the case <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/international\/story\/0,,2046219,00.html\">here<\/a>.<br \/>\nSecondly, blogs &#8211; and other on-line fora &#8211; can attract highly abuse comments. The bad news is that Kathy Sierra cancelled her scheduled appearance at San Diego&#8217;s ETech conference because of violently abuse material postedon-line about her. You can read her account on <a href=\"http:\/\/headrush.typepad.com\/\">her own blog<\/a>.<br \/>\nI agree with her totally when she writes: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;&#8230; do not tolerate the kind of abuse that includes threats or even suggestions of violence (especially sexual violence). Do not put these people on a pedestal. Do not let them get away with calling this &#8220;social commentary&#8221;, &#8220;protected speech&#8221;, or simply &#8220;criticism&#8221;. I would never be for censoring speech&#8211;these people can say all the misogynistic, vile, tasteless things they like&#8211;but we must preserve that line where words and images become threats of violence. Freedom of speech&#8211;however distasteful and rude the speech may be, is crucial. But when those words contain threats of harm or death, they can destroy a life.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I only learned abou the Kathy Sierra case when I was contacted about it by a journalist on &#8220;Scotland on Sunday&#8221; (Scotland&#8217;s biggest national Sunday broadsheet). I wondered how the journalist came across me, but it seems that she sees the issue as one of Internet ethics &#8211; two words not often associated with one another &#8211; and an interesting thing happens if you type the words &#8220;Internet ethics&#8221; into Google (try it).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As will be evident from NightHawk, I&#8217;m a big fan of blogging &#8211; but the blogosphere is a problematic space. Firstly, it is not unknown for bloggers to be dismissed by their employers because they blog. But the good news is that one such blogger has just won a court case in which her employer [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=420"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}