[Air-L] IRB and blogs

[Johnson, Thomas J]

A master's student I am working with was told by the Human Subjects Committee that in doing a textual analysis of indie music blogs that she could not list the name of the blog but had to use pseudonyms.  Has any heard of this before? They are public sites after all and their content is easily searchable.  If you were coding newspapers you wouldn't need to identify them as newspaper A or B.  I think it is crazy, but wanted to hear what you think.