Warblogging's the word (2)
Almost overlooked Steven Levy's piece yesterday on MSNBC. "Bloggers' Delight" is subheaded: "Will the war become the breakthrough Webloggers have been waiting for?" Levy answers that question at the end of the article with a resounding yes in the form of this observation: "So while the war in Iraq might only be beginning, the pundits of the Blogosphere can already register a victory. It's a bloggers' world. We only link to it."
As with today's Financial Times article on warblogging, Sean-Paul Kelly's The Agonist gets first mention. "I've got 32 windows open on my browser, the TV is on, and I've got the BBC on my RealPlayer. I woke up to 332 e-mails this morning," the hyperwarblogger is quoted as saying.
Levy's take on the whole thing:
"Perhaps it was inevitable that this war would become the breakthrough for blogs. The bigmouths of the so-called Blogosphere have long contended that the form deserves to be seen as a significant component of 21st-century media. And in the months preceding the invasion, blogging about the impending conflict had been feisty and furious. But it wasn't until the bombs hit Baghdad that Weblogs finally found their moment. The arrival of war, and the frustratingly variegated nature of this particular conflict, called for two things: an easy-to-parse overview for news junkies who wanted information from all sides, and a personal insight that bypassed the sanitizing Cuisinart of big-media news editing.Blogs deliver on both counts. Kelley's Agonist is only one of many warblogs that suck in reports from around the world and give a constantly updated log of the conflict's arc. (Many are delivered with withering remarks on the stories, most often from a hawkish perspective, though sometimes from a lefty perspective. Kelley leans left, but since the war has started has vowed to stick to the center.)"
Along with The Agonist, other sites mentiond in Levy's piece include The Command Post, War Blogs: CC, Live From Kuwait, Lt. Smash and Back to Iraq 2.0.
