Category Archives: Blogosphere

Intrepid blogger Michael J. Totten ventures to Tel Aviv and thence to Metulla in northernmost Israel, just in time for the big IDF offensive, for podcasting and other reporting. I donated $10 to his effort because he did a good job illuminating events in Iraq and Lebanon. But I did worry some when he described a shot of a C-130 with its wheels down over the Tel Aviv beach as a warplane enroute to bomb Lebanon.

UPDATE  He may have a short journey and wind up interviewing disgruntled soldiers, because after a very confusing 24 to 48 hours, it seems that PM Olmert has accepted the UN’s cease-fire deal. Which, if history is still on its tracks, probably means another, bigger war to come before much longer.

What do you do when your war photo isn’t dramatic enough to produce the desired outrage? A Reuter’s wire service photographer added some buildings from a previous photo of Beruit to this new Israeli airstrike shot, and then cloned the smoke to spread it out. Only he got caught by these professionals and Charles Johnson’s Little Green Footballs and, a few hours later, al Reuters retracted the photo. The photographer, Adnan Hajj, has been suspended fired.

UPDATE Another fake-a-roo from the prolific Mr. Hajj, and 918 others under scrutiny. And soon thereafter, the phenom spread to the NYTimes and its staffer Tyler Hicks. The blogosphere is on the case. And finds that Hicks says he didn’t write the cutlines which make his work suspicious. Then Ynet weighs in with a piece on what is being called Fauxtography.

I swore to myself when I started this blog that I would not succumb to the pressure to post, especially about the news of the moment. But I already seem to be doing that. That way lies madness, I’m sure, and I am going to try to knock it off by writing about things other than the snooze. 

Trevor Butterworth (love that name) summed it up frighteningly (and at great, but readable length) not long ago. Well, in February.

"…the dismal fate of blogging: it renders the word even more evanescent than journalism; yoked, as bloggers are, to the unending cycle of news and the need to post four or five times a day, five days a week, 50 weeks of the year, blogging is the closest literary culture has come to instant obsolescence. No Modern Library edition of the great polemicists of the blogosphere to yellow on the shelf; nothing but a virtual tomb for a billion posts – a choric song of the word-weary bloggers, forlorn mariners forever posting on the slumberless seas of news."

Nope, not me. No, no, no.

And if you have nothing pressing, after reading the whole thing, you might try the 90 comments on his piece. I’m going to go read a book.

If the point of milblogging is to counteract the MSM, the milbloggers are losing, according to a piece in the Wall Street Journal online on J.P. Borda, of Dallas, founder of the more than 1,400-site milblogging group. One of the group’s most popular sites, Matthew Burden’s Blackfive, only gets about 7,000 unique visitors a day.

"Military blogs receive a fraction of the hits generated by mainstream news Web sites. Mr. Burden’s site, for example, receives about 210,000 unique visitors per month, he says. In comparison, Nielsen/Netratings data shows MSNBC.com got 24 million unique visitors last month.

"But milbloggers, who only began online postings in earnest within the past three years, have become increasingly energized and organized in their efforts to counteract existing media coverage. In April, bloggers convened in Washington, D.C. for the first ever milblogging convention."