Web Logs: Troops' War Stories in Real Time. You will need a subscriber login to view the entire article online but I've enclosed some quotes I found interesting below. [Headings are in my words, Italics are quotes]Overall, I think the best benefit is to the troops in the field who get some way of documenting their lives (acknowledging the reality of their situation in some way) and to their families who take comfort in seeing web logs posted on a regular basis.
Noise in the information channel:
a Navy lieutenant based in the Gulf posted some news on his personal Web site: "Saddam fired a couple of those Scuds that he doesn't have at me."...In all, the glut of information from the Gulf -- from the important to the trivial -- is creating a dizzying panoply of detail, as well as half-truths. For example, the Iraqis have fired missiles at U.S. forces but not Scuds.
News from the "non-media":
One needn't run a Web site from the front to publish war news. Julia Hayden, an office manager in San Antonio, posts e-mails from her daughter in the Marines, on a Web site named Sgt. Stryker's Daily Briefing. Her Camp Guam-based daughter, whom Ms. Hayden nicknamed Cpl. Blondie, was one of the first to report in mid-March that some Iraqi troops had tried to surrender near the Kuwait-Iraq border.
An example of the need for corporate policy?
Curiously, unlike the military, traditional media outlets have been trying to quash their personnel's blogging efforts. Kevin Sites, a CNN correspondent in northern Iraq, had been posting photographs, short accounts and audio reports on his Web log until CNN pressured him to stop.
and speaking of policy: Is it ok to copy/paste quotes from the article and publish them to a KMS blog???
Posted by Amanda at March 25, 2003 09:48 AM