More transparency in blogs?

Several MEPs have called for more transparency regarding the authors and financing of online blogs, and have proposed the creation of a seal of quality for blogs. They were prompted to action by a report on the concentration and pluralism of media in the EU which calls into question the independence and reliability of blogs. The blog Kultura 2.0 by the left-wing liberal news magazine Polityka rejects the idea of compulsory transparency. "A natural counterargument is that this would automatically put blogs in a similar position to traditional mass media. For most bloggers observing such regulations would not be a problem, and some of them do not conceal their identities even now. But this regulation could mean that information that is made public in blogs precisely because of their anonymous character no longer comes to light. So while I think that a standardised system for marking blogs is not a bad idea, it should not be obligatory."

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