[Air-L] The Spiders will find you (was wayback machinewaspublic/private)

Tue Aug 14 14:29:59 PDT 2007

JCU,
Great questions and I don't claim to be an expert on ethics or the law so I
respond with my opinions. I admit a bias towards the belief that researchers
should be allowed to use whatever is publicly available. Notification to the
author (blogger) that their posting is part of a study would be courtesy but
should not be a requirement. I appreciate that exposure can cause harm. 

I suppose that I'm a good case study. I've posted blog-like links to various
personal thoughts and experiences on my homepage (http://charlie.balch.org).
Just the other day my wife was not at all happy with me as she revisited
content where I discussed experiences before we ever met. We are ten years
happily married and I got flack for stuff that happened before we ever met.
I have not and will not remove the content. I do need to update it though --
we have not lived in the islands for years. 

For those who visit my home page, my wife likes the mushy story but not the
boat logs. My students often comment on the mushy story part.

Charlie Balch

-----Original Message-----
From: air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org
[mailto:air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of jcu
Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2007 1:50 PM
To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
Subject: Re: [Air-L] The Spiders will find you (was wayback
machinewaspublic/private)

Two questions ...

On literary blogs, blogs that contain creative writing, blogs that clearly
create a copyright symbol or request on the blog page that copyright should
be respected, does a researcher have the right to "research"
the contents of that blog (which to me
implies copying the content, trasposing
it as "data" for the sake of qualitative or quantitative research purposes?

What is wrong or problematic about a
researcher simply asking the blog owner
if it is acceptable to them if their blog contents become the subject of a
research project? Beyond the rules and regs of an ethics research board,
what is wrong with simply asking upfront? rather than working
surreptitiously, lurking or working from an alias?

Simply wondering about this ...

jcu

----- Original Message -----
From: "Charlie Balch" <charlie at balch.org>
To: <air-l at listserv.aoir.org>
Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2007 12:33 PM
Subject: Re: [Air-L] The Spiders will find you (was wayback machine
waspublic/private)

> Interesting point about what is accessible on the Internet. I'd not 
> judge the number of possibilities by the use of IP addresses. It is 
> common practice to have many websites attached to one IP address and 
> many IP addresses are used to connect to the internet but do not 
> provide web content. Even when web content is available at an address, 
> a complete path is necessary to get to the content. I've often placed 
> content that I'd prefer the world not see using a web address that has 
> no referring links and would not easily be guessed.
>
> Search engines follow links that they find on pages. The big engines 
> don't follow random possible content locations. Yes, there are 
> programs that would allow a researcher (cracker) to explore all link 
> possibilities on a site.
> Such an attempt without permission would be unethical. On the other 
> hand, if you've announced your content to the world, the world has a 
> right to explore your content.
>
> I believe that we would all agree that information that a poster has 
> made some effort to make private through the use of a password or even 
> simple obscurity requires informed consent before a researcher should 
> be allowed to us it. On the other hand, publicly presented information 
> should be fair game. This does bring up an interesting question 
> though. At what point can a researcher use hidden information? 
> Historians routinely use the content of diaries and letters that the 
> authors would probably prefer never become public.
>
> The net is providing a fifth estate. Current USA laws are moving 
> towards giving bloggers the same protections and responsibilities that 
> are enjoyed by commercial reporters. Publicly posted that is clearly 
> intended to be read is fair game and should not require review any 
> more than using a reference from a journal or popular magazine.
>
> Charlie Balch
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From:  elw at stderr.org
> Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2007 8:10 AM
>
>
>
>> A web crawler will find you, that's the point. There are a finite 
>> number of IP addresses, 4,294,967,296 (232) , these are what get 
>> resolved from a URL.
>
> Web crawlers don't typically have much luck crawling by IP address.
>
> Name-based virtual hosting @ the level of the web server tends to make 
> it less than adequate.
>
> Best practice for virtualhosting is to make a hit directly to an IP 
> address (rather than a name) return... nothing.
>
> --e
> _
>
>
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