Fernanda Viegas addresses blogging and privacy. Her presentation is based on the results from a survey she conducted on bloggers’ subjective sense of privacy and perceptions of liability in 2004.

Fernanda B. Viégas has just finished her PhD at the MIT Media Lab and joined IBM Research. Her research focuses on the visualization of the traces people leave as they interact online. Some of her projects explore email archives, newsgroup conversations, and the editing history of wiki pages. She is the creator of the award-winning Chat Circles program, an abstract graphical interface for communicating online. Her interest in issues of online privacy stems from her work with large archives of online social data. She received PhD and MS degrees in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT, and a BFA in Graphic Design and Art History from the University of Kansas. More information is available at http://web.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/

Research has demonstrated mainstream media pundits are mired in partisan rancor and rhetoric, eschewing rational arguments for emotional opinions. Will bloggers follow suit?

Jan Boyles is an instructor and second-year master’s student at West Virginia University’s P.I. Reed School of Journalism. Her research emphases include blogging and hyperlocal media. She teaches an introductory journalism course for incoming freshmen. In addition to teaching, Boyles serves as an undergraduate academic adviser and coordinates New Student Orientation. Boyles earned her undergraduate in news-editorial from WVU. She was selected by WVU as a Rhodes Scholar candidate and as a member of the WVU Order of Augusta, the highest University-wide academic distinction bestowed annually to eight graduating seniors. She is also a former newspaper reporter for The Dominion Post (Morgantown, W.Va.), Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette and Charleston (W.Va.) Daily Mail. Boyles co-wrote “Cancer Stories: Lessons in Love, Loss and Hope,” a student-produced book about five cancer patients that was published in 2005 by the WVU Press.

Sandeep Junnarkar addresses harnessing the Web Blogging’s multimedia capabilities to tell the untold stories; and the technical, financial, journalistic and ethical challenges an independent journalist/blogger faces when trying to bypass the traditional media gate keepers.

SANDEEP JUNNARKAR is a Weil Visiting Professor of Journalism at Indiana University in Bloomington. He entered the online journalism world at its infancy in 1994 as part of a team gathered to present The New York Times on America Online, a service called @times. He later became a breaking news editor, writer and Web producer when the paper went live on the Internet as The New York Times on the Web. He received a Masters in Journalism from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia in 1994. He completed his undergraduate degree from the University of California at Berkeley. He served as a reporter and New York Bureau chief of News.com from 1998 to 2003.

A code of ethics for blogging should be based on the rhetorical form of blogging rather than on one particular function of blogs such as journalism. Values like “promoting interactivity” and “prioritizing the human elements of blog discourse” need to be prioritized to the same extent as values like transparency and accountability.

Martin Kuhn is completing his Ph.D. at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and his primary research areas are media law and history. Aside from his exploratory study of blog ethics, he has written about constitutional issues arising from the Can-Spam Act of 2003 and the use of knowledge discovery technologies in federal counterterrorism efforts. He is interested in the relationship between law and ethics regarding new communication technologies.