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

[jcu]

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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