This is a momentous moment. For the first time, war has outstripped sex as the most frequent web search term according to internet service Freeserve. This thirst for information has been matched by increased traffic on news sites. Yahoo! said traffic levels were three times higher in the hour after George Bush told Americans that war had started, while hits at Guardian Unlimited and BBC News Online have increased by at least 30%.
The second Gulf war has also seen the acceptance of the weblog by the mainstream media. Many sites have embraced them. Dispatches from the front line have been presented weblog-style by correspondents "embedded" with troops - travelling under the auspices of the Pentagon or the Ministry of Defence. The BBC's reporters are contributing to a warblog, Nate Thayer is filing from Baghdad for Slate while journalist ML Lyke and photographer Grant M Haller are writing weblogs for the Seattle Post Intelligencer from on board the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln.
A few reporters have set up sites to house independent weblogs, such as BBC journalist Stuart Hughes, and Kevin Sites from CNN, both in northern Iraq. On March 21, CNN asked Sites to suspend his war blogging, causing an outcry among fellow bloggers, illustrating the potential problems of such a strategy in taking reporters' time and energy away from what is already a full-time job.
No such conflicts of interest exist for the few journalists attempting to go it alone in a bid to present an unmediated account of the war. Chrisopher Allbritton, a former Associated Press and New York Daily News reporter is asking readers to support his bid to report the war independently of any news organisation by donating cash for his trip (at my last visit he had raised $9,960.21). He says the fate of Sites's weblog illustrates "why it's important to get independent, reader-funded journalists out there".
Embedded reporters are not always in the best place to report the war fully and accurately: not least because they are censored by the military. As ML Lyke wrote on March 20: "Talk about the 'fog of war'. We're in the thick of it, knowing precious little." Consequently, many of the most interesting sites belong to the non-journalists on the scene; and not only the now famous Salam Pax.
More news direct from Baghdad is available from Electronic Iraq, an anti-war news portal, while Guardian Unlimited is publishing diaries from Jo Wilding, a human rights campaigner living in Baghdad. On the other side of the coin, there's LT Smash, who claims to be a member of the US military, posting his wry accounts of war "live from the sandbox", as he puts it.
But how do you know whether these unmediated, raw sources of information are reliable? As law professor Glenn Reynolds, aka InstaPundit wrote in these pages a few weeks ago, the web has taught people to be more questioning. Many reporters and webloggers have searched for and found ample evidence that Salam Pax is the real thing, and testimonies from other webloggers seem to back up his authenticity. One can be pretty sure, however, that the weblog purporting to be written by Saddam Hussein is a spoof.
Other weblogs are looking at the wider picture of the war, pointing users in the direction of the salient comment, news and analysis of the day - and, in many cases, the hour. Warblogs:cc is a good place to start for pro-war comment, providing a useful collection of warblog entries: likewise the Command Post. The anti-war movement has an equally active array of weblogs: two of the best collective blogs are Stand Down and Killing Goliath.
Indeed, the anti-war movement continues to grow apace on the web. The Stop the War Coalition website has seen a 300% rise in market share in the past few days alone, according to internet ratings firm Hitwise. Meanwhile, my inbox continues to be dominated by messages asking for additions to Guardian Unlimited's guide to anti-war websites.
As the war continues, the web can only become more useful as an information resource and an archive of events, as well as providing a forum for the debate over the rights and wrongs.
If you want to know more, Cyberjournalist.net has an extensive list of links to more warblogs, reporters' journals or other Iraq coverage online.
英国卫报介绍:有关战争新闻的非主流网站(the best of the warblogs)
