Anonymous blog comment safe in Australia

by John Q on October 12, 2005

The issue of how (if at all) to regulate political comment and advertising on blogs (and the Internet in general) has been coming up in many countries as the electoral cycle catches up with the blog explosion. In Australia, the last election produced threats to regulate blogs and other Internet comment on political matters, in particular by requiring identifying details to be posted[1].

This was one of the subjects addressed by the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters Inquiry into the Conduct of the 2004 Federal Election and Matters Related Thereto. I made a submission attacking the idea, and arguing that only paid advertisements should be subject to this requirement. Amazingly enough[2], the Committee agreed.

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Dishonorable Citations

by Henry Farrell on October 12, 2005

The Chronicle has a very interesting (if long) “article”:http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i08/08a01201.htm on the ISI citation impact index, which seeks to measure the importance of academic journals through calculating the number of citations that each article in the journal gets. Like all indices, it creates skewed incentives for people to game the system. Authors tailor their pieces to get into the top journals, while journal editors’ choice of which articles to publish may be influenced by whether or not it will get lots of citations (and bump up the impact factor of the journal). [click to continue…]