What makes a human rights blogger?

Following last week's post on the list of human rights bloggers being assembled by Human Rights Tools, I had an email exchange on what makes a human rights blogger with HRT's editor, Daniel D'Esposito. Daniel noted, correctly, that my comment about 15,000 "human rights" tagged posts on Technorati didn't really add up to that many bloggers:

Problem is many of these are just passing references to human rights...not from blogs devoted to human rights primarily.

In response to my question, "in that case, what makes a human rights blog?", Daniel went on to say:

Lots of posts about human rights seem to come from commentators of international affairs, with a focus on the Middle-East: articles on Bush, Rumseld, Al Jazeera, Lebanon, others blog about personal issues as well - include these would bring a lot of "noise" into the feed. Some institutional blogs are far too active, several posts a day - would drown out the amateur blogs. Some amateur blogs have been inactive for several months. Others are in Chinese or Arabic, so would only be accessible to a fraction of HRT readers. I would certainly include freedom of expression blogs, or peace blogs, or even blogs with a political stance, as long as its respectful of others. So it takes careful sifting, which I will continue to do. The key question to select a blog: would HRT readers find the last 5-10 posts useful and interesting?

...A few bloggers have written to be listed ("I guess I am a human rights blogger"), others have posted the "human rights bloggers" gif on their blog's margin, and this is a good sign.

Since Daniel is putting together a human rights blogging feed, it would be useful to hear what "human rights blog" means to different people, and what readers of that feed would want to see, or would consider off-topic. I was sorry, when Human Rights Watch started the "I blog for Human Rights" campaign, that we weren't able to track which blogs tagged their sites with the HRW button. Self-identification is obviously important -- but reaching out to those who write about human rights issues but don't necessarily see themselves as part of the community is also a part of assembling a good blogroll.

(Thanks to Daniel for giving me permission to post this conversation.)