The May 2005 issue (vol. 5, no. 7) of Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large is available. Crawford’s Cites & Insights 5:7 - Ethical Perspective: Weblogging, Ethics and Impact is available in both the PDF and online in HTML.

The article includes a response to J.D. Lascia’s essay on influence peddling in weblogs.

The article also brought Jon Garfunkel’s Civilities | Constructing Informative Viewpoints to my attention. I saw that Web site and forgot about it. I am glad I was reminded of it. The highlight of Crawford’s column is a response to several of Garfunkel’s postings, such as Deconstructing Blogs: Presenting Blogger Archetypes | Civilities and Social Media Scorecard | Civilities.

Crawford comments that Civilities requires registration in order to comment. I am actually going in that direction. I notice that Civilities uses Drupal | drupal.org, which is a content management system that includes a weblog module. There are two reasons I want registration: 1) to protect the poster from having to leave their email address accessible on the comment page, and 2) to protect my Web log from spam posters. I have had to systematically close comments on older entries in order to prevent spam. Of course, I an still using the shareware version of Movable Type, which does not have comment holding.