Could you be sued for airing your opinions on a blog?

The Guardian has reported in this article that a possible test case is on the way in the UK which will have a serious impact on the freedom of speech of bloggers in the future.

Legal experts warned that the decision could open a floodgate of similar internet libel claims and said bloggers needed to be aware of the law.
"It doesn't matter if it's a newspaper, a letter, a chatroom or a blog, if it's defamatory then whoever writes it could be open to libel action," said Louise Prince, a solicitor with Harbottle & Lewis.

"the blogosphere is now the most vital news source in America"

I just saw this fantastic article in today's Guardian. Arianna Huffington is a US nationally syndicated columnist, author of 10 books and co-founder and editor of the HuffingtonPost.com, she uses this article to explain why the immediacy of blogging will help mainstream mdia, not kill it.

For me, one of the defining moments for the new media came last July, with the London bombings. Many of the Huffington Post's London-based bloggers - like Simon Jenkins, Guardian columnist and former editor of the Times - started weighing in with realtime reactions. I was having my morning coffee and reading my paper copy of the New York Times, which had a front-page photo of Londoners celebrating winning the Olympic bid. And I thought, what a different picture we'd be seeing at that moment. It gave me the sense of how anachronistic daily papers have become - and how, when reading them, you really get the sense you're reading yesterday's news.

Congratulations to Technorati!

Well done to the guys at Technorati, they have won a prestigious award at this years SXSW Awards, more information here. Also winners at the show were 9rules who are doing some great stuff at the moment. The more projects like this which win awards the better, the world of blogs is really hotting up!

While we are talking awards, April will see the first of our Blog of the Month awards, if you have a nomination of a blog which is really hot at the moment, let us know at mail@bapi.org.

Freelance journalists - the new bloggers?

Well, I thought I should bring your attention to another interesting article on blogging, this time it concerns mainstream freelance journalists using blogs.

STAFF JOURNALISTS AT The Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian and every shade of newspaper in between have joined the blog bandwagon, but freelance journalists have been slow to harness blog power. Those that have are using blogs in many varied and innovative ways.
Blogs are free, or at least cheap, and they’re easy to use. You can publish anything from text and photographs to video and audio files immediately.
You are the writer, editor and publisher all in one.
Freelance journalists can use blogs to fatten up features, research stories, garner contacts, market their work, earn cash and publicise projects.

Bapi.org now up and running

Well, after a few provider problems we have now managed to get the BAPI website live at www.bapi.org. There are still sections under construction but the meat is there and there is survey on the front page ready for your input!

Splogging - What can the blogging community do about it?

The issue of splogging (kind of like spam but in the blogging world see this article) threatens to reduce the public's trust in the blogging system. We at BAPI feel this is a serious issue and we'll be looking at the best ways to tackle it from within the blogging community to avoid outside intervention. If splogging is allowed to continue people will learn to only trust blogs which they already know, IMO this defeats the whole object of blogging in that blogs are often read by people who normally wouldn't be hearing that kind of opinion otherwise. If people think that most blogs they visit are going to be just advertising they will stop trying, which would be a great shame.

If you have any ideas of how BAPI can help stop this practice please leave them in the comments section or mail us at mail@bapi.org.

Tim Montgomerie on Blogging

I've been away for a few days but I just wanted to alert you to this great article by Conservative Home's Tim Montgomerie in todays The Business newspaper. Here is a quote:

Some fear the blogosphere will be anarchic. They worry about the impact of
ordinary people publishing widely-read observations without having been trained
at a media college or under the eye of a sage editor. But bloggers don’t just
hold media goliaths to account. They fact-check and criticise each other.
Bloggers who post nonsense can lose the trust of their readerships at least as
easily as CBS, CNN or the BBC. Forward-thinking leaders will seek to benefit
from the wisdom of the online crowds. Businesses should create online
communities of customers and seek their opinions on product improvement. News
programmes should ask viewers for the best questions for that night’s
interviewees. Politicians should invite voters to help them develop policies and
roadtest how they can best be sold.
The successful businesses, broadcasters
and politicians of tomorrow won’t fear bloggers. They’ll embrace them.

Another day, another blogging article...

Following on from the article I linked to yesterday I've been alerted to a great article from New York magazine - The Haves and Have-Nots of the Blogging Boom. This is a huge article which talks about the comparative sizes of different blogs, and how it can be difficult to build up traffic. The following passage illustrates the size of the problem:

If you look at the list of the most-linked-to blogs on the top 100 as ranked by
Technorati—a company that scans the blogosphere every day—many of those at the top were first-movers, the pioneers in their fields. With 19,764 inbound links,
the No. 1 site is Boing Boing, a tech blog devoted to geek news and nerd trivia;
it has been online for five years, making it a grandfather in the field. In the
gossip- blog arena, Gawker is the graybeard, having launched in 2002. With 4,790
sites now linking to it, Gawker towers above the more-recent entrants such as
PerezHilton.com (with 1,549 links) and Jossip (with 814). In politics, the
highest is Daily Kos, one of the first liberal blogs—with 11,182 links—followed
closely by Instapundit, an early right-wing blog, with 6,513. Uncountable teensy
political blogs lie in their shadows.

This is exactly the sort of issue which we set up BAPI to look at, how can we ensure that all bloggers have an equal chance to get an audience? Are established blogs become more like the mainstream media? Should we just let the less popular blogger chat away in silence or are their ways we could make the web a more blog friendly place?

We don't suggest we have the answers to these questions but we hope to get enough bloggers together in one place to discuss the issues and hopefully make the blogosphere an even better place to be!