Confessions of a blog writer

Update Aug 29: Apparently CNET makes corrections without indicating them too. Yesterday, Aug 28, at 2:30pm I read an article on ebooks that quotes my friend and former Dialog colleague Jean Bedord. Problem was it said Bedford. Three times. I sent Jean a quick email just to say I'd seen it. She wrote back today, Aug 29, to tell me it's been corrected. A little unsettling, in that the publication date still says Aug 27, but the text has changed. Somewhat like (tho not .pdf) Walt's C&I, it looks like a static article - published as a final product.
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If you're reading this blog, chances are good you either have a blog yourself or you will sometime soon. It's ridiculously easy to write a blog.

Part of the joy of blog writing is its informality - spelling and grammar don't have to be perfect. Thoughts can be half formed. It's a place to throw out ideas and rants and see what comes back. But let's face it - a real attractive feature is the control. Writing in a blog sidesteps the queasiness that Nevelow Mart refers to after she sees her work in print. With a blog, you can change, delete and add to old entries at will. Not to mention control the date stamp and the comments.

At what point, if ever, does this con the reader? Going back to correct misspellings or edit sentences? Deleting thoughts? Adding them? Changing them? Is there an obligation to add "revised 8/16/04" and if so, when is it triggered?

Yesterday my father and I added a couple of sentences to the Aug. 11 post on Inducing Unintended Consequences for Libraries. We marked the new sentences.

My confession is that I don't usually mark my changes. Usually it's just a few words or a deleted sentence here or there, and I make the changes the same day or soon thereafter. It would look messy and hard to read if I marked it every time I changed something. Yet it raises the question about the mercurial nature of blogs, decidedly at odds with our desire to cite one another. Blogs are starting to be cited even in Senate testimony and in at least one court opinion. What degree of constancy is reasonable to expect in a blog entry?

Comments? If I don't like your comments, of course, I can delete them.

p.s. I've had a web page since 1997 - but the issue never came up. The web page was constantly updated, but didn't have the appearance of an online journal with dated entries.

Comments

[Douglas Scott Treado]

Mary's comments were of interest (August 16)--and
I agree with Jack Stephens' suggestions (Aug. 17) on blogs.
Although I don't have time to blog, it would seem that changing one's posts without acknowledgment would be confusing for readers who come along a bit later to the posting and the responses...I assume words count for something! (Otherwise, what's the use?)
No question, blogs can be useful for throwing ideas around--and who knows?--maybe we'll come up with better ideas just through sharing...

[Jack Stephens]

This is a very interesting subject.

I generally feel that after a reader has replied to a post, then I need to leave it as is. If I change it after someone comments, then it would appear to subsequent readers that the commenter had read the new version.

However, if I was running a blog that got lots of comments (e.g., Little Green Footballs standardly gets hundreds in the first hour) then I would probably still fix a typo or improve wording here or there after someone had commented.

Might it be a question of intent? If I changed a post in response to a piece of criticism without acknowledging that change, then that would be questionable.

[Walt Crawford]

You raise an interesting set of questions, actually for most online content, but I think the ethics of blogging are even less well-defined than elsewhere.

As you may know, those who get LibraryLaw by RSS feed are likely to see changes; I know I've seen three or four versions of that one post. We could save them, but who would do that?

If I had a blog [OK, I do now, but only for Cites & Insights announcements and primarily to serve RSS folk), I'd have to decide whether to follow the lead some blogs use (e.g., Boing Boing), using strikeouts and red type to clarify when something's been changed, or whether to just make changes. The former is clearer but can lead to some very messy posts.

For Cites & Insights, designed as a somewhat formal publication, the answer was simple and I think correct: Once published (once posted), text within an issue is never changed. I'll run a correction later, and certainly clarify, but in later issues--not by modifying the published issue itself. (Even when I changed sites, the only changes in the issues were the URL at the very end and, in a couple of cases, corrections for running page footers--but never the text itself.)

There's probably an evolving ethos here. Actually, given that it's the web, there are probably at least a dozen different evolutions, some of them wildly at odds with one another.