Ethics of Blogging

Today I participated in a meeting of the Bioethics Interest Group in the Faculty of Health Sciences at McMaster University on the subject of ethics and blogging where we had a lively conversation around the use of blogs for medical research. For that I created (with Lisa Schwartz who organized the meeting) a fictional case to problematize the issues. See the extended entry for the case. BIG is a monthly informal discussion of topics related to ethics in health care and biomedical sciences. Some interesting questions that came up:

  1. What can we assume about a blogger? Can we guess at how they assumed their blog would be used?
  2. Is quoting a blog comparable to quoting an online article? or should we try to get consent? More generally, what can we compare blogs to was we try to work out the ethics?
  3. Would getting consent change what was being written?
  4. Would podcasting conversations like the one we had help develop community awareness around the issues?

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fondation Daniel Langlois

The Fondation Daniel Langlois has a very cool Flash web site. Everything launches little windows that let you switch from French to English, resize the window, and get a unique URL if you are trying to reference a specific item. This is useful given that the interface is in Flash.

In particular check out Eisensteins Early Drawings (go to the parent block and open the interactive sketchbook). They have an interactive interface for the pages of the sketchbook which is compelling.

Escape Route

Escape Route is a “photographic travelogue” which shows a 3D itinerary or 2D itinerary of locations for which there are photos. The itineraryies are mapped onto 3d or 2d globes space. There are neat animations for when you collapse from 3d to 2d. I’m so intrigued by the navigation interface I haven’t really looked at the snaps. Thanks to Drew Paulin for this.

Google Sitemaps

Google Sitemaps is a service to allow webmasters to describe what is changing on a site to make it easier for Google to index. There is an interview with the Google engineer at New “Google Sitemaps” Web Page Feed Program on SearchEngineWatch.
I wonder if wikis could be set up to create the sitemap automatically? This is courtesy of Matt Patey who pointed me to the Slashdot | Google Launches Google Sitemaps post.

Microsoft Embraces XML

According to a Microsoft Media Alert: Microsoft XML Architect to Unveil XML in “Office 11” At XML Conference & Exposition 2002. In Office 11 the native file formats will be XML! Neat, but will Microsoft the start extending and extinguishing XML once they have embraced it?

See also, Next Version of Office Will Use XML as the Default File Format. Thanks to Matt and Dwayne for alerting me to this.