Online Audience - 2006 Annual Report

Blogs also apparently continued to evolve, mainly by adding new multimedia capabilities. One major development in 2005 was vlogs, or video blogs. Vlogs like Crooks and Liars burst onto the scene in October 2004 with its posting of the now famous clip of the Tucker Carlson-Jon Stewart clash on “Crossfire.”

Vlogs also played a role during coverage of the tsunami that devastated parts of Asia in late 2004 and early 2005. Most notably, waveofdestruction.org, an Australian vlog, posted amateur videos and logged 682,000 unique visitors in a few days. Some television networks were even alerted to amateur videos by bloggers.53

Vlogs do face some challenges, however. Copyright issues, too little bandwidth, and the amount of data they are able to transmit on time are all obstacles that could hinder growth in the near future.54

Finally, another new type of blog to emerge in 2005 is moblogging, or using a mobile device, such as a cellphone camera, to publish on the Internet .55

Legal Developments in the Blogosphere

Bloggers are also grappling with recent legal developments. In 2005, the news media world was consumed by the imprisonment of the New York Times journalist Judith Miller. In the wake of the investigation, Congress debated whether to pass a federal shield law that would protect journalists from revealing anonymous sources. One of the bill’s sponsors, Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) told an audience at the Inter American Press Association that bloggers would “probably not” be protected under any such law.65

That puts into a legal context the larger questions of whether blogs are journalism, whether some blogs might be and others not, and how that might be determined.

A decision in October from the Delaware Supreme Court also addressed the issue of Internet anonymity. The case involved a blogger’s posting anonymous criticism about a city councilman. The councilman sued the blogger, known as Proud Citizen, for defamation and appealed to the cable company that hosted the blog site, Comcast, to disclose the blogger’s identity. The court ruled in favor of the blogger, declaring that “setting the standard too low will chill potential posters from exercising their First Amendment right to speak anonymously.”

Moreover, the court cited the unique nature of blogs — where one can respond publicly to criticism — as a factor in the decision:

“The plaintiff can thereby easily correct any misstatements or falsehoods, respond to character attacks, and generally set the record straight. This unique feature of Internet communications allows a potential plaintiff ready access to mitigate the harm, if any, he has suffered to his reputation as a result of an anonymous defendant’s allegedly defamatory statements made on an Internet blog or in a chat room.”66

According to Jane Kirtley, director of the Silha Center for the Study of Media, Ethics and Law at the University of Minnesota, this could have long-lasting legal implications for free speech and the blogosphere. Courts at other levels and in other states, she said, are “going to be looking not just at the strong embrace of this idea of anonymous speech but also the fact that the court has set a very high standard of proof; that if someone in a position of power wants to unmask a blogger, they’re going to have to demonstrate that they’re not just filing a frivolous suit that’s really for the sake of unmasking the blogger, but that they have a genuine claim that a court could take seriously.”67