MIT Media Lab’s Fernanda Viegas conducted blogging survey with the goal “to determine the expectations of privacy and accountability that authors have when they blog”.
– 55% of respondents provide their real names on their blogs; another 20% provide some variant of the real name
– 76% of bloggers do not limit access (i.e. readership) to their entries in any way
– 36% of respondents have gotten in trouble because of things they have written on their blogs
– 34% of respondents know other bloggers who have gotten in trouble with family and friends
– 12% of respondents know other bloggers who have gotten in legal or professional problems because of things they wrote on their blogs
– when blogging about people they know personally: 66% of respondents almost never asked permission to do so; whereas, only 9% said they never blogged about people they knew personally.
– 83% of respondents characterized their entries as personal ramblings whereas 20% said they mostly publish lists of useful/interesting links (respondents could check multiple options for this answer).
– the frequency with which a blogger writes highly personal things is positively and significantly correlated to how often they get in trouble because of their postings; generally speaking, people have gotten in trouble both with friends and family as well as employers.
– there is no correlation between how often a blogger writes about highly personal things and how concerned they are about the persistence of their entries
– checking one?s access log files isn?t correlated to how well a blogger feels they know their audience
– despite believing that they are liable for what they publish online (58% of respondents believed they were highly liable), in general, bloggers do not believe people could sue them for what they have written on their blogs.