Abusing (and using) the blog

Sorry folks, I'm abusing my blog for research purposes by embedding the video below. It's an example of a military blog making the news, so I wanted to make sure I didn't lose track of it.

It's about Col Sgt Michael Saunders (2 Mercian) who has been blogging while on deployment in Afghanistan. I wrote a piece which included a reference to his blog for the Frontline last week. I missed the fact that his pub/blog posts had made the news back in April because I was preparing for a conference.

The great thing about blogging is that when you post stuff up people get in touch with you, and I was really pleased to get an email from Mike's brother, Tracey Tyrls, who features in video. I've been following that up this morning.

(Beats working on interview transcribing. Yesterday I finally wrapped up several days work on one that came to 18,908 words. I am left wondering how the people at Hansard transcribe sessions of parliament and remain sane).

Telegraph journalist vs the Milbloggers

Over on my Frontline blog I've been looking at some of the military blogging reaction to this article and video by embedded Telegraph journalist Nick Meo. And there'll be more on this soon...

Picture blogging to support the troops

My latest Frontline post is about the Military Motivator blog.

Contact in Iraq and other links

From the American Milblogs:

• Lt G at Kaboom experiences his first contact in Iraq...

• ...while Frontline Fobbit begins his journey back home to the USA with a 28 hour journey to Kuwait.
  

In Iraq:

• Last of Iraqis, doesn't like the new national flag...

• ...and nor does Great Baghdad.
  

On blogging:

• A Kenyan blogger believes 'bloggers are the ultimate source of primary information in Kenya today'.

Danish Milblog launching at the Frontline Club

The Frontline Club are hosting a blog by a Danish soldier due to be deployed in Afghanistan in the near future.

After going through the rigmarole of medical jabs, writing a will, and telling his family that he's about to go to one of the most dangerous places on the planet, Lars decides to entitle his first post: 'Why do I do it?' Indeed.

Bandwidth: the curse of US milbloggers

Frontline Fobbit says he hasn't been able to access his blog recently because his journal has been blocked by military networks. He claims:

"It isn't because of anything I did or said, but because they have filtered out blogging sites to conserve bandwidth."

'Bandwidth' was also cited by the US military when they stopped serving soldiers using Youtube and MySpace in May last year.

If any other US milblogs have been affected in the same way as Frontline Fobbit please get in touch.

I've said it before and I'll say it again...

...get over to Kaboom: A Soldier's War Journal. He's a Lieutenant serving in Iraq. Here are his two latest posts: In My Army, and Graveyard Shift. Lt G's blog is interesting, original and beautifully written.

'Blog-journalism': New York Times gets to grips with a 'blogging' rival

The New York Times has written an article profiling Michael Yon, a blogger or independent journalist, who has written numerous dispatches from Iraq. His reports are funded by readers who donate money on his website.

In the article, Yon says he didn't know what a blogger was when he started writing and that he was not a journalist.

Now, after several years covering the Iraq war, Yon 'insists that he still does not really know the rules of journalism, but says he has recently, grudgingly, accepted that he has become a journalist.'

The New York Times isn't sure how to describe Yon or his work either:

1. 'Like most bloggers...'
2. '....such citizen journalism...'
3. 'Internet journalist...'
   
4. Eventually appearing to decide that: 'he created a niche outlet', 'better reported than most blogs', and 'more opinionated than most news reporting'. His work put many 'professional journalists to shame.'

I wonder when Yon decided he had become a journalist? Is there a noticeable difference between his early work and his later dispatches? Can you categorise some of his writing as 'blogging' and other bits as 'journalism'?

It all suggests that blogging is more than merely a new platform for information. There appears to be some sort of identity associated with being a blogger and a different one for the journalist. Similarly, journalism is cast as being different from blogging and Michael Yon's work as somewhere in between the two.

The relationship between blogging and journalism is being formed by individuals like Yon and articles like these. Blogging is not usually journalism but it can be. And if a blog becomes recognised as journalism, does it cease to be blogging?

Perhaps there is a category of writing that sits between blogging and journalism - a sort of 'blog-journalism' - more opinionated and argumentative than most news journalism, but more factually reliable, better-researched, and generally more relevant (in a news sense) than many blogs.

The New York Times article can be found here.

Blogging in the snow

• "It was a gift straight from Mother Nature herself (with a possible assist from her red-headed stepchild, Global Warming) – snow": Lt G over at Kaboom tells us about his first 'snow patrol' in Iraq.

• And it's no warmer in Kabul, Afghanistan. Maj Gian P. Hernandez escapes the weather to watch the neurosurgeon at work in the ER room of a local hospital.
  

British soldier blogging the Iraq war?

It looks as though Universal Soldier is going to start some sort of retrospective blog of the Iraq war. He's written a teasing little post taking us all the way back to Autumn 2002 and the build up to war in Iraq.

Blogging so long after the event does mean you lose one of the crucial publishing advantages of the medium: immediacy. But I haven't come across any British milblogs that blog regularly and immediately from the front line in the way that US soldiers do, so I'll be sitting, watching, and waiting, for future posts.

I'm enjoying Lt G at Kaboom...

Here's his latest post. For starters, I haven't picked up many milbloggers who begin with Shakespeare! But for me, the most interesting part and the crux of the post, is the suggestion that America's recent success in finally winning over some hearts and minds is mostly a consequence of giving Iraqis jobs and filling their wallets.

Milblogging: how it might change military history

Whenever I read milblogs and hear people talking about them, I become more convinced that blogging must transform the whole discipline of military history.

In the first instance, understanding morale, combat cohesion, and the battlefield experience of Afghanistan and Iraq should be much easier than previous wars. No need to go searching through the archives or getting hold of family letters that have been locked away in an attic for 50 odd years. Instead, you can log on to the Internet and track down some blogs. You'll also have access to photos and video.

Second, I believe the insights into combat provided by bloggers might help us understand previous wars. Bloggers' willingness to share their personal feelings, for example, might provide valuable insights into PTSD. This knowledge could then be used to re-approach studies of 'shell-shock' during World War One, where the condition was barely recognised, let alone discussed.

Third, military historians will have to get to grips with understanding blogs as a source. Blogs may still often resemble the personal diaries that soldiers in previous eras kept but they have significant and fairly obvious differences.

Historians will have to understand why people blog; what their motivations are; how the process of writing on a computer differs from writing with ink on a page; what difference publication, reaction and comment makes to a blog; the extent to which military censorship of a blog is similar or different to censorship in the past.

Milblogging discussion on US Radio

Various mil(itary)bloggers discussed their writing on KUOW radio yesterday morning including Gordon Alanko, Doug Traversa, Benjamin Tupper and Army Girl. David Sandford was also on the show. He's the editor of Doonesbury.com and started the Sandbox website in October 2006 to provide a forum for milbloggers.

You can listen to the whole show here.

Blogging from beyond the grave

I've just come across a fascinating blog post via the Sandbox website. It was written by Major Andrew Olmsted who was killed in Iraq on 3 January.

He was trying to persuade insurgents to surrender when he was hit by sniper fire. He soon became the first US Casualty in Iraq in 2008. (There's more about the circumstances of his death at Rocky Mountain News.)

Olmsted had prepared a 'Final Post' in case he was killed in Iraq and primed another blogger to publish it the day after his death. It's a surreal thing to read and I'm not really sure what to make of it all. I've certainly never seen anything quite like it before.

(My immediate and rather strange thought is that sombody could prepare a whole raft of blog posts to be published after their death and thus 'live on' in the digital world.)

Here are some extracts:

• "This is an entry I would have preferred not to have published, but there are limits to what we can control in life, and apparently I have passed one of those limits."

• "What I don't want this to be is a chance for me, or anyone else, to be maudlin. I'm dead. That sucks, at least for me and my family and friends. But all the tears in the world aren't going to bring me back, so I would prefer that people remember the good things about me rather than mourning my loss."

• "Believe it or not, one of the things I will miss most is not being able to blog any longer."

• "I do ask (not that I'm in a position to enforce this) that no one try to use my death to further their political purposes. I went to Iraq and did what I did for my reasons, not yours. My life isn't a chit to be used to bludgeon people to silence on either side."

• "I write this in part, admittedly, because I would like to think that there's at least a little something out there to remember me by. Granted, this site will eventually vanish, being ephemeral in a very real sense of the word, but at least for a time it can serve as a tiny record of my contributions to the world."

• "This is the hardest part. While I certainly have no desire to die, at this point I no longer have any worries. That is not true of the woman who made my life something to enjoy rather than something merely to survive."

You can read the full post at the Sandbox.

Kaboom: A Soldier's War Journal

A new US milblog including first impressions of military life in Iraq. Also has a useful 'military jargon' toolbar for the uninitiated.

Iraq through the eyes of soldiers: 'a fraught project'?

An American soldier who wrote articles for The New Republic Magazine has had his articles completely retracted after months of speculation in the blogopshere and in the mainstream media about the accuracy of his accounts.

For a brief overview of the saga you can click here. But in this post I'd like to discuss the problems these events raise for milblogging.

Near the end of an article for The New Republic magazine, editor Franklin Foer says this:

"Beauchamp's writings had originally appealed to us because we wanted to publish a soldier's introspections. We still believe in this journalistic mission, especially as the number of reporters embedded in Iraq dwindles. But, as these months of controversy have shown, telling the story of what is happening in Iraq through a soldier's eyes is a fraught project. The more we dug into Beauchamp's writings, the more clear it became that we might have been in the realm of war stories, a genre notoriously rife with embellishment."

Although Beauchamp was publishing through a magazine, his accounts are little different in style to what you find on many milblogs. One of the advantages of the blogging phenomenon was supposed to be access to first-hand accounts without the interference of the mainstream media or other sources.

But how useful can it possibly be if the account is made up, or at best factually inaccurate, and how can we as readers spot the errors?

Beauchamp wasn't a journalist. He was surprised when the TNR came back to him and made such a fuss about whether one of the incidents he described happened in Kuwait or in Iraq. Here's what Foer said:

"...we finally had the opportunity to ask Beauchamp, without any of his supervisors on the line, about how he could mistake a dining hall in Kuwait for one in Iraq. He told us he considered the detail to be "mundane" given the far more horrific events he had witnessed. That's not a convincing explanation."

It certainly isn't. But an understandable one if you have no training. For Beauchamp, the difference between Iraq and Kuwait was negligible. For a trained journalist, it's a fundamental error - the sort any good journalist would try to completely eradicate.

Milbloggers helped bring the Beauchamp accounts down but where does it leave milblogging? How do we know that milblogs aren't filled with similar errors?

Can we rely on the milblogging community to sift out the chaff? Do we not need good, trained embedded journalists after all or are they just as error-prone as bloggers?