Blogging roadblocks?

On March 21, William Jacobson came into our Independent Media classroom to discuss his blog, legalinsurrection.com. He focused more on the backend of blogging and the mechanics behind it than the content itself and he raised a lot of questions and concerns that I realize many bloggers may or may not take into consideration. For example, a blogger's reputation may be at risk — William is a Cornell law professor who blogs about politics and takes an open and very direct stance in his work. That being said, he has encountered issues with finding students and keeping his job due to this blog.

In addition, blogs don't necessarily use any type of style guide, which causes concern for politically sensitive topics. There is an appropriate way to reference groups of people and discussion topics that need to be applied when discussing issues, especially on a public forum. However, blogs — because they are opinion-based majority of the time — don't take these terms into consideration and while opinions aren't necessarily something to be corrected, language is.

While I believe that blogging is a great way to uncover government scandals and dive deeper into important issues, there should be a few guidelines that are followed by bloggers because of if they're going to be a strong voice of the public, they should at least be sensitive in language usage and politically correct.