Posts under ‘Ethics’

Dave Winer: It’s one thing to let Microsoft buy space on your site (it’s called advertising) and quite another to accept Microsoft money for words coming out of your mouth. Next month when we read something positive on these sites about Microsoft, how are we supposed to know if it’s an opinion, or just another [...]

The Guardian: Right sermon, wrong preacher. There is an easy response to Tony Blair’s lecture on the failings of the media, and some will seize on it. It is to accuse the prime minister - the master (some will say) of half truths, evasion and spin - of breathtaking hypocrisy and an almost clinical lack [...]

Andrew Keen’s book, The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is killing our culture, was officially published this week. It is a shabby and dishonest treatment of an important topic.
We do face many problems in a digital age, including several of the general issues Keen raises. (I wrote about many of them in my [...]

This article, “10 Things We Hate About Apple,” caused a mini-revolution inside of PC World, a magazine that is part of the IDG empire. Harry McCracken, the editor in chief, quit in protest when the story was killed but returned when it was reinstated and the publisher reassigned to other IDG duties.
It was a victory [...]

If The SF Chronicle reports on a Santa Barbara News-Press story Sunday that reeks of journalistic malpractice.
A data-recovery company found child-porn images on a computer once used by the former managing editor, Jerry Roberts — as well as all kinds of other people, including whoever previously owned the computer and sold it, used, to the [...]

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SF Chronicle: Tough decisions on how much to show. Grim video sent by the Virginia Tech killer to NBC News led editors, producers and media ethics experts to resume an uncomfortably familiar debate. “You have to find that line between serving the public’s right to know and the obvious public interest in knowing and understanding [...]

Tim O’Reilly, instrumental in the recent brouhaha over blogging codes of conduct, offers some valuable “Lessons Learned So Far,” which include:
* The poor choice of the “badges” I proposed, together with a reiteration of why I thought badges might be useful.
* The need for a more modular code of conduct, a set of axioms rather [...]

SF Chronicle: Food bloggers dish up plates of spicy criticism / Formerly formal discipline of reviewing becomes a free-for-all for online amateurs: Just days after opening Senses, his San Francisco bistro, Teo Kridech clicked onto the World Wide Web only to find that his dream business was considered an overnight flop.
“Senses is like a botched [...]

Amazingly, the man who concocted the anti-Hillary remix of the old Apple 1984 commercial is proud of himself.
After the Huffington Post outed Phil de Vellis, a now-former employee of a consulting firm that has been working for Barack Obama — whose campaign was designed to be the main beneficiary of the ad remix — de [...]

LA Times: Blogging for dollars raises questions of online ethics. Payments by advertisers to bloggers for writing about their goods, critics say, blur the line between opinion and product placement.

This is not a close call. To take money for touting products in a blog and not disclose it — prominently, and in context — is [...]