Librarian Way

An enhancement to the Electronic Frontier Foundation How to blog safely guidelines is in progress at AnonBlog - Global Voices. This wiki entry was created by Global Voices Online so that many can collaborate in creating the document. In the first paragraph of the AnonBlog wiki they write, “While the guide is quite rich in tips to ensure you don’t reveal too much personal information while blogging, it doesn’t look very closely at the technical issues associated with keeping a blog private.” The purpose of AnonBlog is to cover the technical issues, like creating a psuedonym and how to hide an IP address.

The reason for having an anonymous weblog is to protect your personal privacy. Others may use it to report ethical issues with an employer—whistleblowing. Use an anonymous weblog to protect your privacy from marketers and others, but write as though you can be traced. In spite of using techniques to hide, you can usually be traced if it is a legal matter—though that does require the cooperation of various Internet companies.

Library Clips put together a list of tools to re-mix RSS feeds so that you can get a per site or master category feed: RSS: filter and re-mix :: May :: 2005. They susggest that you can use some of the tools to develop a topic portal.

In Tearing Down Walls on Jonathan Schwartz’s Weblog, Schwartz writes that IBM has decided “to permit company employees to blog.” Jonathan Schwartz is president and chief operating officer for Sun Microsystems. That was only one wall that was torn down: The headline is about the forging of a business relationship between Sun and Microsoft.

Schwartz provides a link to the Sun Policy on Public Discourse, which he encourages IBM employees to use as a guide. Since blogging is increasing among librarians who are acting as employees, these guidelines may be of interest to libraries and professional information organizations.