Amnesty (again) and Google...and blogging ethics!

There is an interesting article on Amnesty's activities (mainly in Australia) before Beijing here. It also links to something that we all think about nowadays and touches upon privacy issues - Google Street Mapping. (see Stilgherrian's post). I would be very interested to hear what you think. On Twitter opinions are skeptical, still I personally have nothing against it - we do live in CCTV age and if I need to loose a bit of my own privacy but gain on my security - I would agree - I think I agreed long time ago, actually. The thought of having on-line view of my flat windows available doesn't scare me - mine faces one of the main squares of our little town, other one of the main paths. (I would be interested to know what EU and UK law states about privacy in Google's case though. Any lawyers around?)Browsing around all those Amnesty sites I have found an interesting guide to blogging (fresh, March 2008, great graphics btw) including few notes on ethics written by Dan Gillmor (interested in privacy issues, as far as I can see) , who finds basis for blogging ethics in journalism: 'There are pillars of good journalism: thoroughness, accuracy, fairness, transparency and independence.'I thing it's a valid point - according to Fromm, there are two types of ethics - modern ethics (due to the commercialism and tolerance based development of societies this set of rules is based on our subjective judgments, i.e. code of ethics must be agreed on by majority of us) or traditional ethics (set of rules given by superior 'powers' - however we define those - always objective). If we want to follow modern approach, we still need traditional (journalistic) point of view at least to start developing our own codes of blogging ethics.

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Buy comments vs. stay ethical

I would be so tempted..if I could only think it's fair:) Buying comments on-line seems to be quite easy...I don't really think is very ethical.The amount of visitors to my - quite fresh site - was lower yesterday, which spoiled my cool Google Analytics graph. Oh, well! It's not what the whole blogging is about, is it? I hardly have any comments here and still know that my friends and colleagues read it time to time.
I do not think I would like to pay anyone for 'upgrade' of my page rank, not even when they admit to be cheeky:Interesting to see how people perceived it last year. I wonder if the awareness of web ethics changes since last year summer. I suppose it increased...

Web ethics in 2003

On the CyberJournalist I have found this interesting code of web ethics here...posted in 2003, but if you check the comments you will see that already then bloggers were trying to separate themselves from pure journalism and that the word TRANSPARENCY is being used. Brilliant discussion on whether  code of blog ethics is needed at all, whether it should be based on journalists experience or whether it should still re-written by fans of honest blogging...check it out! My readings for tonight;)

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