i concur.

freedom, though, comes with responsibility. if you choose not to read a blog, there is always that option of not reading it. click the “close” button. this is not a matter of whose-burden-is-heavier. this is a matter of bloggers acting with justice and fairness and accountability to readers.

“all the freedom in the world” comes with the fair warning that in the exercise of freedom, no fundamental and essential right is transgressed.

It is not entirely a very good idea to teach a 3-month old baby how to write supercalifragelistisecdsvrtdrgvhhndrasudnc!@#$%. Since you can’t just tell engineers or carpenters or high school kids to practice journalism ethics or research paper standards or English proficiency (because it’s not their line), then tell these engineers and carpenters and high school kids to be engineers and carpenters and high school kids and NOT be journalists or researchers or linguists. Since you can’t get these people to follow technicalities or blogging ethics or whatever when it comes to an issue they are not well-versed or quite adequately oriented about, then tell them to blog because the blogosphere is a marketplace of ideas and opinions. All people from different walks of life blog because they can — the English proficient, the slacker, the corrupt, the irresponsible blogger, the responsible blogger, the senator, the police, the gradeschooler, you. The cyberspace is market and I can only hope you know how it goes there.

When we see relatively bad blogs not worth our time, or if we see a really bad opinion badly delivered, then that’s where our role comes as recipients of information — to know what information to believe and what not to. The burden is with us readers/audience to assess what we read.

We have all the freedom in the world to discriminate information we see from blogs as much as bloggers have the freedom to express what they feel.

alex:

of course you do have the option to click the “close” button and not read what a blogger has to write. responsible blogging - that is to say the act of writing - is THE responsibility of the blogger. blogging is way different from reading; a reader doesn’t assume a responsibility to disseminate information that is well within the bounds of what is fair and what is just.

i don’t know about bullcrap, though: when you say that “Therefore, to say that responsible blogging lies mainly on the blogger is bullcrap,” it seemed - at least to me - that blogging the same as reading, that writing is the same thing as reading something written. which it’s not.

i do agree that a critical reading of blogs is very important.