To grasp the power and breadth of the weblog let's look at how it's been used in the recent conflict in Iraq.
The Richmond Palladium-Item recently carried an article entitled "Warblogging: Web journals convey “raw stuff” of Iraq war" which I scanned in.
The speed of updating stories from Iraq is astonishing. This Blog:
brought breaking news of the shelling of the Palestinian Hotel in Baghdad. On April 11th it was updated at over 5 times per hour on average between 8am and 1pm EST.
One can also easily find alternative points of view. The Peking Duck from Bejing which purports to be "A peculiar hybrid of personal journal, dilettantish punditry, pseudo-philosophy and much more" reported on April 5th how "Iraqi forces crush American-led villains" according to the Chinese state television network CCTV. Intruiging; as is his reporting on SARS in Bejing:
Chairman Mao: No Sars in Bejing
A more "conventional" Blog is "Stand Down: The Left-Right Blog Opposing an Invasion of Iraq" which on Friday April 11th carried articles about war tax resistance, worldwide antiwar protests, and Islam and America on just that day's posts.
This blog format:
stand down Margaret stand down please ...
has characteristic list of dated / timed entries which are exerpts from full posts indicated by the link. It also has the obligatory list of links to other like minded blogs. The Comments section for each posting can also be revealing - watch out for "language" too :-)
"Delicious blog-bites delivered piping hot to your doorstep most weekdays from Galway, Ireland." is the blogline of Smoke Signals, a somewhat trite production, but which did lead me to the genuine and worthy Back In Iraq 2.0 from a reporter in Kurdish held northern Iraq.
War reporting can also have it's humorous side with a "fan" web site devoted to the incomparable:
In fact, blogs have broadened the reportage available to U.S citizens beyond the narrow confines of the pop TV and News outlets. A Wired News article from mid-March called Media Watchdogs Caught Napping reports Guardian Unlimited's deputy news editor Jon Dennis as saying " The only debate in the U.S. media is on the Web... "Weblogs are doing all the work that the U.S. media did in the past," he said. "That's an interesting development." "
But popular newsblogs such as the Drudge Report - 11th April headline: "CNN CONFESSIONAL: THE NEWS WE KEPT TO OURSELVES" - can fall prey to a dangerous temptation. Noted War Blogger Cops to Copying , an article in April 7th Wired News, alleged that the author of the "wildly popular" blog, The Agonist, Sean-Paul Kelly, had been 'economical with his sources', so to speak, and that much of the interesting intelligence that he purported to have uncovered himself was actually copied word-for-word from a paid news service called Stratfor. This overt plagiarism was commented upon in Dean's World where the notion of "Intellectual property is theft" was attributed to Kelly's blog site.
Another reason for Blog-watching is that they are generally refreshingly free from advertising. However, there are exceptions and Breaking News: War in Iraq is one.