The rise of blogs

In 2002, Dave Sifry started Technorati. It's a website that tracks blogs, allowing users to search and participate in the blogosphere. By April 2004, the site was tracking more than 2 million blogs. Today, the site is tracking 112.8 million blogs.

4 Rifles in Basra

4 Rifles came home from Basra, Iraq last weekend after a six month tour of duty. If you want to find out what they've been up to for the last few months, Michael Yon, an 'independent' American journalist has been embedded with them. He's currently writing up a series of dispatches. Part One is introductory, providing some background on British operations in and around Basra. Part Two describes the battalion's first mission during the tour on 21 May.

Ahmadinejad's blog in The Guardian

I can't think where The Guardian got the idea for this article from.

A Blog from Inside Iraq

My favourite 'inside Iraq' blog is written by a Baghdad dentist. He blogs at Last of the Iraqis. His latest post is rather conspiratorial and I'm not sure he has much evidence for some of his musings, but his observations about life in Iraq are fascinating. Here's a bit I picked out towards the end of his last post:

"And by the way when people outside Iraq is hearing about the improvements they have the idea that everything is very good and it's so safe now, well, I'd like to make a correction; the "Hot zones" are way much better, because they were very disturbed before, it's relatively OK now, but the rest of the areas are almost the same, for example while I was writing this post there was two earth shocking explosions, and there was the 10 missiles attack in AlShaab few days ago and even yesterday I was in Palestine St. when a side road explosive detonated very close to me, I saw it in my own eyes…"

This blog was a recent feature on BBC Radio 5's Pods and Blogs and it looks as if there's going to be something on Radio 4's iPM programme this Saturday.

Ahmadinejad

I set the iPM team the challenge of getting hold of the President of Iran to talk about uranium, US foreign policy, and nuclear power to discuss his blog for their Saturday programme. I reckon the opportunity to momentarily escape the whirlwind of international politics and have a cosy chat with Eddie Mair would be too good to miss. Surely.

Collecting Iranian blogs

What better place to start a collection of Iranian blogs than with Mr Ahmadinejad's irregular musings!

Reporting strategy and tactics

http://kingsofwar.wordpress.com/2007/11/16/the-missing-link/#comments