NPR reports that one US soldier – Colby Buzzell – has been reprimanded about his popular “My War” blog and two others have had their blogs shut down after alleged concerns about their revealing sensitive information. Others suggest the Pentagon is more interested in suppressing overt dissent among the troops. The NPR report links to 18 soldier-run weblogs from its page.

I have to say that for all my expressed skepticism about the importance of blogs in general, blogs like My War seem to me to be fulfilling an important role and genuinely doing something novel – allowing ordinary individuals caught up in situations of international importance to express what they are feeling and thinking with a rare directness. Buzzell’s site may not be anything like as influential as the mass media but he says he sometimes gets up to 100 emails a day from readers and that he is now thinking of trying to get his weblog postings published.

It’s stories like his that inspire my own research into the social significance of weblogging and home page creation.

JD Lasica “suggests”:http://ojr.org/ojr/technology/1092267863.php that because blogs like “BoingBoing”:http://boingboing.net/ and “Slashdot”:http://slashdot.com/ are linked to more often than many websites of many ‘old media’ organizations, this means bloggers are starting to trust other bloggers more than the mainstream media.

While “Technorati’s chart of in-links”:http://ojr.org/ojr/uploads/1092273094.jpg (and “pubsub’s”:http://www.pubsub.com/linkranks.php) comparing ‘old media’ properties and blogs are interesting to see, they under-state the importance of the mainstream media to set the agenda because a very substantial proportion of the posts to blogs that are linked to are in turn derived directly from those same old media sites. A better (but more difficult to do) analysis would be to try to measure how many of the posts most linked to add significant facts or thought out opinions (more than just ‘I agree’) to existing debates in the press.

Moreover, it is absurd to extrapolate from the readership habits of bloggers to the readership habits of the wider public. Bloggers are in no way representative – we are much more likely to read other people’s weblogs than the broader Internet population (see “the analysis I did earlier”:https://blog.org/archives/001206.html) and of course most of us are geekier (Slashdot is the most popular weblog cited – QED).

If you want to see what influential US Internet pundit/policy wonks think about the potential of the Internet to change politics you should keep an eye on the Extreme Democracy weblog and download the chapters of the book in progress there.

“Emergent Democracy”:http://www.extremedemocracy.com/archives/2004/08/chapter_1_emerg.html which I “commented on earlier”:https://blog.org/archives/000687.html is there for example. It has been edited since my comments but it still appears to overlook the very real problem of the continuing digital divide both in the US and across the world and both in Internet access and, more importantly, in the forms of Internet use. I suspect most of the chapters of this book shares this problem though I have yet to read more of them.

All the evidence I have been able to derive (based on the raw data of a Pew survey in Mar/April 2003 which was made into a “report”:http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/113/report_display.asp) suggests weblogs – particularly political ones – are read by a very small audience. To quote some earlier research I did based on the Pew data:
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Back and forth the pendulum of history swings. First the Aborigines in Australia were savages to be pitied, then they were victims who were pitilessly killed by white colonists – then 18 months ago Keith Windschuttle, a conservative historian wrote a stinging rebuke to those historians who strove to uncover the dark side of Australia’s history, claiming that they appear to have exaggerated or made up the evidence of those crimes. Not surprisingly, it has touched off “a furore”:http://www.sydneyline.com/.

The Australian brings us “up to date with the controversy”:http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,10205639%255E28737,00.html in a manner rather sympathetic to Windschuttle. I don’t know whether he’s right or wrong but the Australian historical establishment’s seeming desire to circle the wagons and attack the man and the media rather than his allegations is un-edifying. It seems to be having the unfortunate effect of turning him into a “martyr among conservative bloggers”:http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&url=sydneyline.com.

I hope someone from the Australian historical establishment will come by and make a good case for why things are not as they have been painted by the media and Windschuttle himself…

As an instinctive free trader I am pleased to read that the World trade talks have reached agreement but I hope the developed world follows through promptly on its promise to eliminate some subsidies at a “date to be set”.

I was somewhat surprised to see the BBC essentially pushing the neo-liberal ‘party line’ though, saying, for example:

According to the World Bank, a successful final deal could add $520bn (£280bn; 420bn euros) to the world economy by 2015, if rich and developing countries cut their tariffs. Most of the benefit would, the World Bank believes, go to poorer countries.

Personally I believe this to be true but it’s hardly an uncontested claim. While there is discussion of “the iniquity of developed world farm subsidy”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3183139.stm (for example) I couldn’t find a part of the BBC’s news site (at least not the part linked from the front-page story) where they give space to the broader claims of the (self-proclaimed) “global justice movement”:http://www.weareeverywhere.org/ that free trade harms the poor more than it helps them.

Actually I am curious – where on the Internet should I look for a reasoned argument that free trade (free on both sides not just free entry to poorer countries by the rich) would be bad for the poorer ones?

Danah Boyd says she’ll double her contribution to Kerry if ten readers contribute by tomorrow.

I’m not crazy about Kerry (as a “recent posting”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_current_affairs_us.html#001180 might indicate) but I don’t think he’d be a bad president and I think it would be catastrophic for the US and for the world if we had another four years of Bush in the White House.

I am one of those who has decided to donate as a result (and I already donated once earlier). If Bush does get in I don’t want to have thought I could have done more to stop him. It depresses me that my most important vote is the one I make with my wallet but that seems to be the way American politics has gone.

If you are at all motivated to join me please do so and let her know. And do it soon – tomorrow is the last day you can donate!

P.S. It’s annoying that the Kerry site seems to believe you have to be a US resident to donate (the online form insists on a zip code). Don’t they want my money? There is no legal reason I can’t donate as far as I know (I am an American citizen, though I don’t boast much about it these days).

“Chris Bertram”:http://eis.bris.ac.uk/~plcdib/ posts on Crooked Timber about the “UN’s Human Development Report 2004”:http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/2004/ which has produced (inter alia) a “human poverty index”. Predictably the fact that the UK, Ireland and the US are numbers 15, 16 and 17 among developed countries on that index has been remarked upon and just as predictably the low placement of the Anglo-Saxon countries is blamed by some on fiddling of statistics. If you are interested in inequality (as I am) you could do worse than read the long thread of mostly thoughtful comments after the Crooked Timber posting.

As a Canadian (generally big-housian) living in the UK (generally small-housian) I have been struck by the different attitudes toward space in different countries and (I believe) through that towards possessions. “Donella H. Meadows”:http://www.pcdf.org/meadows/ (now deceased) of the “Sustainability Institute”:http://www.sustainer.org/ wrote about a calendar showing the “lifestyles of people around the world”:http://www.menzelphoto.com/gallery/mw.htm including their homes. She notes that on the calendar the number of family members living together varies between 4 and 13 and the houses ranged in size from 200 square feet (a six person yurt in Mongolia) to 4850 sq ft for eight people (in Kuwait City).

Bhutanese family with all their possessions in front of their house from the book “Material World”:http://www.menzelphoto.com/gallery/mw.htm

Our ‘two bedroom’ flat is tiny by Canadian standards but a moderate size for Londoners (something like 600sq feet?). It has become apparent to me that we don’t have room for any more things (whether in storage or in active use) but it doesn’t bother me all that much yet – it helps us to keep our lives simple. Thank goodness I have almost limitless digital storage available at least!

Has anyone tried the experiment where you put a sticker on anything you use in the course of a year and at the end of the year you throw away anything without a sticker?

A Slate columnist (Chris Suellentrop) suggests that Douglas Feith – the Pentagon’s No. 3 civilian, after Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz – is implicated with many of the more serious Iraq problems.

Or to put it more simply, according to “General Tommy Franks”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2100899/ Doug Feith is “the f*cking stupidest guy on the face of the earth.”

There’s also audio available of “Suellentrop making similar charges on NPR”:http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1908107 and “Feith subsequently responding to the criticism”:http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1909390.

Interestingly, I checked out links to the Slate article on “Technorati”:http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&url=http%3A%2F%2Fslate.msn.com%2Fid%2F2100899&sub=Go%21 – none of the twenty were from people trying to defend Feith. Perhaps there is something to the notion that people in the blogosphere tend to read stuff that reinforces their world view? And interestingly too perhaps thanks to the blogosphere the Slate article about Feith is #2 on Google after his official Pentagon page.

P.S. Sorry this is rather old and the blog hasn’t been updated in a while – my wife and I have been off in Sicily for a week or so (which also explains why I haven’t returned your email if you have written recently).

“Ethan Zuckerman”:http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ethan/ – philanthropist, academic and geek – has recently been “quantifying”:http://h2odev.law.harvard.edu/ezuckerman/ which countries are written about by which media outlets. Of particular interest to bloggers he has been comparing ‘mainstream news’ outlets to what the blogosphere talks about.

One possible methodological weakness – his study doesn’t seem to weight by impact or story length. If, say, NBC talks about Sudan once in the news for three minutes it may have more impact among Americans than a hundred mentions in the Seattle Post Intelligencer, the The Free Lance-Star etc (let alone the many overseas news sources on Google News). The same argument could be made about blog postings – if lots of ‘minor’ blogs post about the Sudan but none of the majors do, that is important to capture. Of course no research method is perfect and it is a lot easier to poke holes than suggest methods of one’s own. So hats off to Ethan for at least starting a debate!

Also see some analysis of the coverage of “The Sudan in particular”:http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ethan/2004/05/27#a209 and in the comments I found references to “NKZone”:http://nkzone.typepad.com/nkzone/ a weblog about the biggest news black hole – North Korea.