Watch out when you blog.

On 26 of January 2010, a news title "Blogger held over insulting posting" was published. A blogger named Aduka Taruna was arrested due to his blog post that contains insultation about the late sultan of Johor. He was asked to remove the post and make a public apology.

In my opinion, those people who insult others on his/her blog are just trying to gain attention. For example, Aduka Taruna received more than 1000 comments on that blog post. or have you ever heard of perezhilton.com? It is a famous blog that brings you the juicy celebrities rumours in Hollywood. Even the name of the blog itself is already insulting, what more to say about the posts it in? This website is getting 1746031 views per day and USD5240.74 daily, believe it or not. (Perezhilton.com overview, n.d.) It is true that freedom of speech is our constitutional right, but that doesn't mean we could write slander about someone.

Here in Malaysia, there is an act relating to the law of libel and slander and other malicious falsehoods which is the Defamation Act 1957. A person who is guilty for libel or slander can be jailed up to 2 years, or fine, or combination of both jail sentence and fine. (Law, 2008)

There is always a rule for everything, so does blogging. Below are the 4 etiquette of blogging : -

#1 do not write something scandalous unless you're interested in the taste of jail.

#2 do not copy and paste the content/images from another person's blog, be original.

#3 do not aggressively promote your blog when responding to another person's blog, nobody likes attention seeker.

#4 do not stick to the same old content. constantly changing the content of your blog will keep your readers returning back.

(Peterman, n.d.)

According to Aristotle, ethic is the sum of values which enable the pursuit of happiness. Ethic is obviously important for publishing as well. Hence, here are a few ethical principles we should follow.

• the freedom to publish and the struggle against censorship in every form.
• fair agreements with the authors as unbalanced standard agreements that cannot be changed obviously lack fairness is another principle.
• instance respecting cultural and intellectual minorities who deserve their own publishing outlets (Krevelen, 2005)

References:

Peterman, M n.d., Blogging Etiquette, Buzzle.com, viewed on 12 November 2010, http://www.buzzle.com/articles/blogging-etiquette.html.

Law, E 2008, Defamation law in Malaysia, Laweddie.com, viewed on 12 November 2010, http://www.laweddie.com/wordpress/defamation-law-in-malaysia/.

Perezhilton.com overview, Website outlook, viewed on 12 November 2010, http://www.websiteoutlook.com/www.perezhilton.com

Krevelen, LV 2005, 'Truth and heresy: The ethics of publishing in the 21st century,' Publishing research quaterly, vol.20, no.4, pp35-40.