May 06, 2005

The Weakness of Blogging

Gunner over at No Quarters points out a weakness in blogging. Essentially, he says that bloggers are weak due to their individual nature...meaning that when a big company comes in and doesn't like what a blogger is writing about, they can simply threaten a lawsuit in order to make the blogger fold (main example: Google Blogoscoped).

How can we, as bloggers, without the large legal departments that large corporations employ protect ourselves?

Gunner offers the following possibility:

Bloggers do not have teams of lawyers yet, but there is always the future. Maybe we, as a group, need to find a company like this, Pre-Paid Legal. They offer you legal insurnace for as low as 26$ a month. One day they may offer a blogger discount.

I offer another possibility. Blogging alliances. Not in the current form of blogging alliances (which is just a glorified way of linking up with a bunch of other blogs...not that there's anything wrong with that), but with official cirlces of bloggers that share something in common...such as the Media Bloggers Association (of which I am a member).

Groups such as this can provide resources to individual bloggers in legal defense, obtaining information through FOIA, etc. The MBA is moving in that direction, and I feel that more groups such as the MBA will start popping up. By joining together, groups of bloggers can utilize their numbers to protect the individuals within their "alliance" from those that would oridinarily be able to strong arm a single blogger into folding and giving in.

Anyway...back to CARR. We're about to do a team exercise to use statistics to explain the reasons why gun ownership is up. Man...this is going to be interesting.

Comments:

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I was looking for something like this for handgun carry permit holders a while back - but you are right - bloggers risk the same kind of exposure.

Posted by: DocB at May 6, 2005 03:17 PM

That would be something good for the TFA to do.

Posted by: Blake at May 6, 2005 03:38 PM

While we can be taken down one blog at a time, we do have the army ant advantage. For every one you smash, three will replace him.

I will check out the Media Bloggers Association. thanks.

Posted by: gunner at May 6, 2005 09:03 PM