Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.
--Eric Hoffer, The True Believer
New Media Blogs Gain Ground During War Coverage
More and more people are supplementing their war news diet with blogs from around the world.
ABCnews.com noted today, Blogs and other nontraditional news sites could be gaining ground among digital information seekers because they offer views that are uniquely compelling, personal and sometimes completely overlooked by traditional outlets. One of the most popular is the Dear Raed blog from Baghdad. At this point, the consensus appears to be that it is genuine -- although some critics and skeptics maintain that it may be a hoax or propaganda ploy. In the UK, The Guardian has enough confidence in Dear Raed to run a text-only version of this blog on its own site. And this recent Reason magazine editorial provides ample food for thought about Raed. (Best line: Unless the author is a world-class novelist, which makes it unlikely that he's a spook, it's hard to imagine he could pull off such a glorious feat of fiction.)
Usually, weblogs attract only a small audience. However, Dear Raed
turned out to be a little too popular for the free service that hosted its online images. Wired News reports that earlier this week Taylor Suchan, operator of the web image hosting service Pyxz.com, effectively (but temporarily) sabotaged Dear Raed by redirecting the blog's image links to parody images on a porn site. Suchan was frustrated because service to the rest of his customers suffered greatly due to high bandwidth demand for Dear Raed. Suchan said he asked Blogger (which hosted everything but the images for Dear Raed for help -- but when none was forthcoming his next step was the redirects. This apparently worked: Blogger responded by upgrading Pax's account, so he can now upload images directly to Blogger's servers.
Reuters also notes today that Soldier blogs such as L.T. Smash are becoming very popular, too. Which all goes to show, I think, that a significant part of the news audience craves a diversity of perspectives, and they're willing to make their own judgments about credibility.
· Soldier Blogs [Reuters]