J.D. Lasica has a great article on OJR about the ethical considerations that bloggers are being faced with more and more these days. Defintely a part of the blogs growing up meme that seems to be running through my aggregator lately.

While they may not have a rulebook, bloggers have evolved a loose-knit set of general tenets. These principles seem to be widely held:

* Disclose, disclose, disclose. Transparency – of actions, motives and financial considerations – is the golden rule of the blogosphere.
* Follow your passions. Blog about topics you care deeply about.
* Be honest. Write what you believe.
* Trust your readers to form their own judgments and conclusions.
* Reputation is the principal currency of cyberspace. Maintain your independence and integrity – lost trust is difficult to regain.

I hope I can get into the blogs evolving idea more later, but I think it’s safe to say we’ve entered a new stage, maybe adolescence as Tom calls it. Early indications are this could be messy, and it’s not clear what the adult blogger looks like…
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Uh. This is one of those posts that congeals out of five or six interesting reads that have so much going on in them that there’s almost no way of synthesizing it all into one coherent, fairly concise piece of writing without rambling. But that is the work of blogging, isn’t it?

And maybe that’s as good a place to start as any, with blogging, the verb. It is the act of blogging that validates blogs, that sets them apart. Sure we call it Weblog software, but I’ve argued in the past that blogging, the verb, is a special use of the software that frankly, the vast majority of users don’t practice. The blogging recipe requires reading first, then thinking, then writing and linking, then publishing, and then reading some more. It is writing that is born in ideas not experiences, because while we can reflect on experiences, ideas are where we do the heavy lifting, the real social construction of truth that these new media require. I blog, you read, you think, you blog, I read, I think, etc…and in doing so we push each other’s vision and idea of truth in whatever matter we’re writing about.

Take yesterday’s post on this topic by Tom.
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