doodledee

It's been neat watching the blogging community react to the war.

One of the things blogging fans like to talk up is the immediacy and uncensored nature of weblogs. People can pretty much do/say whatever they want, whenever they want. This means no 'big corporate cleansing' of a story and no delay in getting it online. In other words, you get *all* the details of how my Christmas lights were vandalized, not just the condensed, sanitized version that CNN wanted you to hear! Fight the power!

Sometimes blogs can be great. Take the September 11th attacks in New York, for example. Figure there are hundreds, if not thousands, of high quality weblogs being run out of New York. When the attacks hit, many of those bloggers grabbed their cameras and hit the streets. While the mass media [understandably] focused their attention on the big pictures, the blogging community rounded it out and filled it in with some smaller scale, personal stories. Cool stuff.

This time, however, it's a little different.

In the weeks and months leading up to the war, lots of bloggers made public their feelings about what we - the US - should be doing in Iraq. Seeing as it was all just personal opinion, it wasn't all that different than reading the op/ed pieces in the papers. (Other than the fact that, as a whole, the op/ed pieces tend to be better written.)

Now that the war is on - and being fought half a world away - blogs seem out of step. Most of the stuff you see people posting is just regurgitated from the mainstream press. Exit immediacy. Exit uncensored. Exit big selling points.

There are some exceptions. Kevin Sites, a reporter for CNN on location in Iraq, had a blog going up until late last week when somebody - presumably CNN - made him stop. There's also at least one (one!) dude in Baghdad who has been writing some interesting stuff, but some people don't believe he's legit. To be sure, there are probably more, but it's not nearly as potent as it could be if the story was in a freer, more wired society.

So there. I kinda developed a theory about localization of story and relevance of blogging. Now I think it's time for some snood.

>honk<