Weblogs: August 2008 Archive Page

My colleague Lee McClain passed this article on to me -- via a post-it note attached to the dead-tree edition of the story.

"Move over, mainstream media, it's the voter's turn," says the blurb for an event called: "Tapping the Creative Community: The Power of Voter Generated Media."

To be sure, there are television satellite trucks parked in the parking lots around the Pepsi Center, blow-dried anchormen speaking earnestly into cameras and dignified, old hands like Bob Schieffer of CBS roaming about the hall.

But in the media security lines snaking outside the convention venue, the faces are mostly young, the equipment mostly laptops, and the credentials for Web sites you may have never heard of. --Mackenzie Carpenter, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

I've gone underground to finish off a few projects related to Colossal Cave Adventure, so the blogging has been light. But I'm surfacing in order to blog about this poll, which shows that a majority of respondents said that the government should not force bloggers to give equal time to opposing views, some 31% disagreed.  I'd really rather see all this information in a table, and of course I'd want to see the actual questions, but it looks like that sort of thing is reserved for paying customers.

Even Democrats say hands-off the Internet though but by a far smaller margin than Republicans and unaffiliated voters. Democrats oppose government-mandated balance on the Internet by a 48% to 37% margin. Sixty-one percent (61%) of Republicans reject government involvement in Internet content along with 67% of unaffiliated voters.

So that means that almost half of the Democrats who resonded are in favor of government regulation of the content of blogs. Did the question differentiate between personal blogs and professional ones?  What about discussion forums or social networking sites?  How net-savvy were the people who were polled? Was it a telephone survey that only called people with land lines? There are too many unanswered questions to make any sort of conclusions (which isn't stopping the folks at slashdot, of course).