Blogging and Purpose

This is a good idea. Should have happened sooner, but now that it is happening should be recognized as an important tool not to be wasted. If a blogger develops the wrong reputation, simply replace the blogger, the idea itself is solid.

The State Department, departing from traditional public diplomacy techniques, has what it calls a three-person, "digital outreach team" posting entries in Arabic on "influential" Arabic blogs to challenge misrepresentations of the United States and promote alternative futures for Islamic youths besides terrorism.

Our bloggers "speak the language and idiom of the region, know the culture reference points and are often able to converse informally and frankly, rather than adopt the usually more formal persona of a U.S. government spokesperson," Duncan MacInnes, of State's Bureau of International Information Programs, told the House Armed Services subcommittee on terrorism and unconventional threats on Thursday.

The State Department team's approach is to join an Arab blog's conversation, often when it turns to the motivation for U.S. policy toward Iraq, and when others are claiming that the U.S. occupation is meant to help Israel or to secure oil. "Our job is to address that motivation issue and show them that that's not the motivation," MacInnes said.

"You can't just say, 'Well, here's our policy,' and drop it into the blog. You have to have what I call a bridge," MacInnes said. He then described using a sporting or current event or even poetry that would "allow one to get to be in a conversational mode with people."

I've been thinking about blogging a lot lately. The content, the message, and the purpose. I think the State Dept. is leveraging a clever use of the medium for engaging the conversation at the lower level and reaching a larger audience. I've been thinking about blogging networks a lot lately, because I'm curious how large content centric blogging networks can get and how many people the message can ultimately reach.

Three things have motivated me to this train of thought. The first motivation was the guest host blogging SteelJaw Scribe provided for the new Maritime Strategy. I think that led to some excellent discussion about the new Maritime Strategy not found anywhere else besides CDR's place online. The second motivation was a post made by Mike last month about the 'network' of naval bloggers vs air force bloggers. It is an interesting read (and he followed it up here). The third motivation has been observing Lex and Chap who have taken turns taking a break from blogging recently. Observing the community reaction has been interesting to me, because both of those blogs are places I have frequented daily for a long time; long before I started blogging myself.

One reason why observing the absence of Lex and Chap is so interesting to me is because before I was a blogger, I was a blog commenter (although infrequent compared to now). I have observed that it was through the comments of both Eagle1 and CDR Salamander's blogs that attracted Naval centric bloggers to create a rather large centralized naval blog community based solely on the discussions started at those blogs. I have also observed some of the most popular contributors to the Navy blog community aren't bloggers, rather commenter's, for example a reader at CDR's or Lex's place will know who "sid" or "Byron" is even though neither actually has their own blog.

However, what is noteworthy about those two commenter's, is they have long belonged to other naval centric communities online outside of blogs. Before I was a regular at CDRs place, I knew Byron through Harpoon3 and sid through other forums online, and had extensive discussions with both in the past on naval centric issues. Observing naval centric networks across the internet it appears CDRs place has become a hub for people who interacted throughout the internet on a variety of mediums before blogging was prominent.

I'm not sure I know what makes this blog popular, but I do know why this blog, usually topic centric on naval issues, has become popular. The vast majority of my readers come from three places; CDR Salamanders blog, Eagle1's blog, and the Sub Report. Without their stamp of approval on the content here early and often, most things said on smaller, less established blogs like mine would have been noise in the background.

I'm still learning blogging and the nature of blog communities in general, but from what I can tell it does not appear difficult to build a topic centric blogging community, Navy or whatever. One observation though, in building these topic centric networks it does require the larger hubs at the top of the traffic chain to build the blogs at the bottom. If the blogs at the bottom build up their own traffic outside the system, which I believe I have done a little due to my communities prior to blogging, that traffic inevitably finds its way back up the chain which further strengthens the network.

Where is this going? Ultimately, blogging has found its way into culture and I feel privileged in many ways to be somewhere near the middle of the navy network of bloggers today. Given the decline of print media in general, it is noteworthy the USNI is in the process of moving Proceedings online. What does that mean for Navy bloggers? I honestly have no idea, but it allows us to talk about the content (assuming the content is worth it).

This latest news highlights the blogging medium employed as a tactic for the State Dept. in reaching its audience. This is equal to government recognition to the power of blogging as a medium to influence ideas. Again, I'm not really sure what it means in the larger scheme of things, but in ten years when people look back and try to figure out what happened during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, will they be reading archives of the New York Times and Washington Post?

Maybe, but I think serious researchers will spend more time reading The Long War Journal and Michael Yon. That line of thought has me curious what the future of what naval centric blogging is. Already thanks to SteelJaw Scribe and CDR Salamander bloggers engaged the discussion of the new Maritime Strategy well before it was disseminated elsewhere. Is that part of the future of naval centric blogging, and will it ultimately make a difference in such discussions in the future? I don't know, but I am curious whether the network of naval centric bloggers would be a cheaper and smarter method to reach a larger, topic interested audience than town hall type meetings like the ones the Navy is promoting.