Blogging (page 3)

Nearly four years later, al Qaeda has become the first guerrilla movement in history to migrate from physical space to cyberspace. With laptops and DVDs, in secret hideouts and at neighborhood Internet cafes, young code-writing jihadists have sought to replicate the training, communication, planning and preaching facilities they lost in Afghanistan with countless new locations on the Internet.

Al Qaeda suicide bombers and ambush units in Iraq routinely depend on the Web for training and tactical support, relying on the Internet's anonymity and flexibility to operate with near impunity in cyberspace. In Qatar, Egypt and Europe, cells affiliated with al Qaeda that have recently carried out or seriously planned bombings have relied heavily on the Internet.

Such cases have led Western intelligence agencies and outside terrorism specialists to conclude that the "global jihad movement," sometimes led by al Qaeda fugitives but increasingly made up of diverse "groups and ad hoc cells," has become a "Web-directed" phenomenon, as a presentation for U.S. government terrorism analysts by longtime State Department expert Dennis Pluchinsky put it. Hampered by the nature of the Internet itself, the government has proven ineffective at blocking or even hindering significantly this vast online presence.

• Merriam-Webster?s definition of a blog is ?a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments and often hyperlinks.?
• But this definition does not capture the true context of the blog.

• By way of analogy, consider a dictionary definition of a telephone: ?an instrument that converts voice and other sound signals into a form that can be transmitted to remote locations and that receives and reconverts waves into sound signals.?
• That?s fine if you already know what a telephone network is, but the definition doesn?t work on its own.

1. Just as telephones are meaningful only when connected to the telephone network, so
2. blogs are meaningful only when connected to the blog network.
3. Both are carriers of human communication.

a network,
a message-passing protocol,
nodes that
aggregate inputs and
produce outputs.

Its foundation network is the Web;
its protocol is RSS;
its nodes are bloggers, and
the input is action and/or information, while
the output is information or/and action.

The blog network is made of people.
We are the nodes, actively filtering and retransmitting knowledge.

• More subtly, it can also help ensure that no vital inputs are suppressed because nobody has to rely on a single source.
• If one of the feeds I monitor doesn?t react to some event in a given domain, another probably will.
• When they all react, I know it was an especially important event.

Editor's Note: The following article from USA Today newspaper captures the spirit of the remarkably successful "mini-newspapers" called blogs. Blogs Are Weblogs, or online electronic journals.

QBTPL.com provides you the capability to create your own blogs for free. As soon as you log in with your username and password you will see an option called "Your Diary". This is our equivalent of a blog, and anything that you put here will be visible to other users under the "Free Member Diaries " hyperlink at the top of the screen. If you don't see the Diary option just create a user account and provide an email address so that we can send the password to.

The email address does not have to be traceable to you, but just some place from where you can access the password that we send you. With the username you chose, and the password we sent, you can log into your account to access the Diaries or blogs.

Bloggers and traditional journalists feed off each other ? it can be a terrific synergy. Newspapers and TV or radio reporters often provide the blogosphere with the initial information. Bloggers then either simply link to stories of interest, or comment on them at length, or use them as the basis for their own reporting ? digging up records, memos, other stories, etc. Then it's back to the traditional media. Thanks to the blogs, a smart editor or producer can see what people are interested in.

The blogs are where you find the answer to "What are people on the Net saying?" Bloggers write short pieces and long pieces. Sometimes an entry is just a link and a quip. Other times it's a lengthy and well-researched essay (with lots of links). But bloggers read one another and link to one another, creating that blogosphere ? a giant spider web of connected sites. If a news item tickles any part of the web it's not long before it's felt far away. Sounds a lot like newspapers in the early days, don't it?

Not that anyone should get all their news from blogs. But they'd be just as foolish, these days, to simply rely on traditional media. Blogs have succeeded because we the people need them. We didn't know it, but we sense it. Bloggers are filling in where journalists miss. Blogs are filling a role that used to be filled by that mass media: Digging deeper into the news and offering fact-checking, perspective, and doing more than simply reporting.

(QBTPL's software design allows you to create individual blogs. If you sign up on any one of the sites that QBTPL has created, you will find that each registered user has a "Diary." This diary can be used for blogging, and on all our sites this feature is available for free. All it takes is a user name and valid email address to create a registered account. You can create an account on this site (www.qbtpl.com) itself and try your hand at blogging ... for free.)

An approach is to simply blog intelligently about your work or industry, Professor Halavais said. "Those looking to hire will notice you through your blog as a passive candidate, and that's often a much better way to find a job." "That's the advantage of blogging ? if you do it well and have interesting things to say, people pay attention," says Hugh MacLeod, creative director at Alcazar, an advertising agency in Newcastle, England. Corporate recruiters use blogs to draw in qualified candidates, and they search for potential hires by reading bloggers who write about topics relevant to a particular industry. Job seekers use blogs to establish a strong online presence, display their skills and advertise their availability. For many just out of college, the blog is an essential networking tool because it is common for bloggers to link back and forth to others with recent posts.

• "It's a trend on the rise right now," Michael Gartenberg, a vice president and research director at JupiterResearch in New York who covers blogs said, "especially for employers, who get a much better sense of a person this way. R?sum?s and interviews are a very scripted process; read someone's Web log and you get a good sense of that person's thinking and perspectives."
• Alexander C. Halavais, a professor in the School of Informatics at the State University of New York at Buffalo who studies blogs, also expects blogs to play a larger role in the job market. "Right now," Professor Halavais said, "recruiting this way is invisible, it's not institutional yet. But I would be surprised if, fairly soon, we didn't see blogs become a much bigger part of job searching and recruiting,"

IF YOU TRAWL the posting boards at FreeRepublic.com long enough, you'll go mad. Hundreds of voices are shouting, spitting, and clamoring for attention at any given moment. The night of Wednesday September 8 was no different. Following the 8 P.M. airing of CBS's 60 Minutes hit on President Bush's record in the Texas Air National Guard, Freepers were rattling their cages and pinging around the web in anger and disconsolation. On a thread begun in response to a New York Times article about the 60 Minutes story, "tomahawk" wrote, "The MSM [mainstream media] are whores for Kerry, whores for Democrats, and whores for Jihadists. Through their lies and distortions, our country's continued existence is now in doubt."

Amidst this clamor, the post by "Buckhead" could easily have gotten lost. At 11:59 P.M. (all times in this article are Eastern Daylight Time), Buckhead wondered about the fonts and spacing of the memos supposedly typed by Bush's National Guard commander and "newly obtained" by 60 Minutes. Buckhead speculated that they couldn't have been produced in the early 1970s, when they were dated. "I am saying these documents are forgeries," Buckhead wrote, "run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old." In an email to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Buckhead was loath to claim credit for his insight: "The internet is a big place, and I can't believe that other people didn't notice the same thing around the same time." Nor did he want acclaim: "I don't care to be outed as my alter ego. Day job and all that."

Buckhead's doubts were No. 47 in a list of 217 comments, on one of dozens of such discussion threads. But they were noticed by Tom Mortensen and Liz MacDougald who, the next morning, emailed the link to Scott Johnson, a lawyer in St. Paul. Sitting at home, Johnson reprinted Buckhead on the blog he runs with two fellow lawyers, Power Line (powerlineblog.com), at 8:51 A.M., and then went to work. When he arrived at the office, he had nearly 50 reader emails waiting for him from people like John Risko, a former Navy clerk and typist, who explained why he, too, thought the memos might be forged.

This small snowball of doubt was about to become an avalanche as something Los Angeles radio host and blogger Hugh Hewitt calls the blogosphere's "multiplier effect" took over. In California, Charles Johnson, who runs the blog Little Green Footballs, had seen both Buckhead and Power Line and decided to run a test. A desktop publishing pioneer and webpage designer in his day job, Johnson opened Microsoft Word and without changing any of the default settings--tabs, margins, font--created an eerily similar replica of one of the memos in just a few minutes, and posted it at 1:24 P.M. By lunchtime Thursday, the small, incestuous blog world was humming with the notion that CBS had presented forgeries. The story went nationwide at 2:50 P.M., when the Drudge Report linked to Power Line with the headline: "'60 Minutes' Documents on Bush Might Be Fake /// 32-year-old documents produced Wednesday by CBSNEWS 60 MINS on Bush's Guard service may have been forged using a current word processing program // typed using a proportional font, not common at that time, and they used a superscript font feature found in today's Microsoft Word program, Internet reports claim . . . Developing . . ."

In May, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said Web logs and the way they are distributed can be used as business communication tools, signaling Microsoft's growing awareness of blogging as a potential threat and a new business opportunity.

Microsoft competitor Google Inc has also embraced blogging as a way to deliver more information to Web users.