Report on Ethics in Blogging Survey

Report Summary:
As the prevalence and social influence of weblogs continue to increase, the issue of the ethics of bloggers is relevant not only to the blogging community, but also to people outside it.

This study explored ethical beliefs and practices of two distinct groups of bloggers–personal and non-personal–through a worldwide web survey. Over a period of three weeks, 1,224 responses were collected and analysed.

Our findings show that these two groups are distinctively different in demographics, blogging experiences, and habits. We also found that there are significant differences between personal and non-personal bloggers in terms of the ethical beliefs they value and the ethical practices to which they adhere.

Key Findings:
Our findings indicate that 73% of the bloggers surveyed said that their weblogs are personal while the remaining 27% said that their weblogs are non-personal. Further investigation of, these two groups revealed many significant differences between personal and non-personal bloggers.

Personal and non-personal bloggers value and adhere to four ethical principles differently. For instance, personal bloggers believe that minimizing harm is more important than non-personal bloggers.

For both groups of bloggers, they believe attribution is the most important and accountability the least important.

The degree of association between ethical beliefs and practices is different for personal and non-personal bloggers: in general, the level of correspondence between what people believe and what they do is higher for non-personal bloggers than personal bloggers.

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