As a side note, and with completely acknowledged self-absorption, this blog has reached its first 1000 readers!

War. Huh. What is it good for?

Let’s take a look at war’s tag cloud from the view of traditional publications and online social media publications. I would predict before running this analysis that the more traditional print publications would be more theoretical with big ideas, while the social media publications would focus more on today’s wars. (Note: the results from Technorati, Youtube & Google are recommended searches or tags from the search engines themselves and are not tag clouds.)

Let’s see how well my prediction works:

Mirriam Webster’s definition of war looks like this as a tag cloud:

Encyclopedia Britannica’s tag cloud for war looks like this:

When I search Technorati for blogs tagged with war, it suggests the following tags are related:

iraq politics bush terrorism israel news iran middle east military lebanon

Youtube’s search results for war recommend that I also try:

Google’s related searches include:

vietnam war peloponnesian war war definition world war 1

According to a tagcloud from Wikipedia, war is:

There are some interesting results here. The dictionary and encyclopedia provided largely expected results. Wikipedia’s also seem fairly similar, with some surprising entries. For example, “youth” is one of the key words in the cloud, perhaps reflecting more of a social commentary about war (that it’s often the young who are sent).

The other social media results come from related searches, and as such display a different kind of information. These are terms that are often associated with war by users while tagging their content or by users searching on the term “war”. Technorati’s list of related tags provides an overview recent and ongoing wars.

On the other hand, Google’s suggested searches focus on older wars. Perhaps with the plethora of information about today’s wars from news outlets and blogs, fewer people are using search to find information about contemporary wars.

Youtube has particularly interesting results in its recommended searches, and also in the videos that are returned for the search. Most of the recommended searches refer to video games and movies. Nearly all of the videos that are returned in the top 20 for this search are for video games, comedy routines, or songs. The lone exception is the following; a song that plays to images from the Iraq war:

On the other hand, searching for “Iraq” in Youtube, nearly all of the videos in the top 20 are related to the war (with the possible exception of 2 videos on Marines seeing UFOs in Iraq).

Interestingly, a search for “Iraq” in Technorati pulls up mostly posts about politics in the U.S. In fact both of the searches on “war” and “Iraq” pull up headlines from the Politics section of the site.

As promised (though late, again), I’ve done a quick analysis of the websites dedicated to Western Sahara. Unfortunately, I was not able to find much that was relevant in the blogosphere by searching for Moroccan Sahara, so I’ve opened the scale of this a bit (!) wider to websites that come up in the first page of a Google search.

Before I get to that, what I did find interesting in the blogosphere were the videos. This was something I hadn’t explored much when I did my earlier Technorati search on Western Sahara. A search for “Western Sahara” brings up videos on culture, news, and the conflict.

A search for “Moroccan Sahara” has some videos on culture and several on travel, but most focus on the conflict.

My Google searches presented similar results to this. “Western Sahara” brings up official country information sources like the CIA World Factbook and a Google map of the region. The remainder of the links on the first page of results seem generally pro-self governance, but are certainly not propaganda.

“Moroccan Sahara” is, again, full of travel links. They’ve clearly won the tourism war. As expected, there is no official country information associated with this search (it would all be under Morocco), but there are 2 other links of interest: www.moroccansahara.net and www.westernsaharaonline.net. They are both pro-Morocco. I find it interesting that Western Sahara Online does not appear on the first page of the “Western Sahara” search.

Finally, a Google search for “Polisario“, the Sahwari movement for independence, includes many news articles and pro-idependence links.

It’s interesting to see that while the pro-Moroccan propaganda forces have cornered the search market for Moroccan Sahara, they have had no success breaking into the top results for either Western Sahara or Polisario. Significantly, none of this has spilled over to affect “Morocco“.

What is it like to live in a region largely at peace but without government? We’ve heard many stories about war torn regions where there is little to no government control, but what about those places that actually don’t have a government at all?

Western Sahara has existed in this state since the 1960s when it was released from Spanish colonization. “Release” is the best word I can come up with, as control of the territory has been disputed since that time. The United Nations has listed it as a Non-Self-Governing Territory since that time. With little pressure to resolve the dispute from the outside world, the two opposing governments of Western Sahara (Morocco and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic – SADR) vie for recognition from other countries.

So what are Sahrawi bloggers saying?

New Sahrawi Satellite TV Station
I started over at Global Voices, and discovered they just began coverage of Western Sahara on July 5th. Their first highlight notes a brand-new TV station run by the SADR or SADR-sympathizers (I’m not entirely clear which). This seems to be the first one, so it’s interesting to see how the blogosphere reacts to this. This post, which pulls from (an translates) the Arabic Western Sahara blog, now has 29 comments – most of which are positive about the new station.

I found one of the comments (actually #29) particularly interesting:

Mohamed, mohamed and Agaila, you and your supporters were alone on the Internet since more than a decade to support separatism in Western Sahara. Now, that the Moroccans especially the sahraouis are aware of the impact of such a media, your sole aim is to discredit the arguments of unionist sahraouis on Internet by qualifying them as members of DST…

What I find so interesting is that this person is suggesting that one side in the sovereignty dispute dominated the online space for several years.

Natural Resources & Human Rights
Onward through the blogosphere, my Technorati search on Western Sahara brings me 612 posts. The relevant ones in English (that aren’t spam/advertising blogs) focus on resource disputes and human rights violations. There was an interesting post on politics and one of the plans put forth to resolve the dispute by Nick Brooks, a climate scientist who studies the Sahara desert. In fact his posts categorized under Western Sahara are all quite interesting and provide his personal experience grappling with the dispute. Most of these posts are written by people outside of Western Sahara, so with the exception of the last one, they don’t quite provide the internal perspective I was looking for.

Interestingly, the launch of the Global Voices Western Sahara blog garnered quite a bit of attention. I guess GV does play an important role in make voices heard.

The View from Western Sahara
Luckily, many of the comments on GV posted linked to their favorite Western Sahara blogs. Here’s what is out there:

• Unfortunately, I don’t speak Spanish, but Saha blogs aggregates over 20 Spanish-language blogs on Western Sahara. From what I can understand (thanks to French and Latin), there is a range of topics – from human rights to a poetry festival to something about the prime minister of Spain.
• Another Spanish-language blog by Aziza Brahim, a Sahrawi singer, shows some of the culture of the territory. Again, I can’t understand much, but I believe she just performed in Madrid.
• One Hump or Two? is a fantastic name and a blog about the Western Sahara by a fellow Washingtonian. Will Sommer comments on the latest news affecting Western Sahara, including a recent attack on a Sahwari human rights activist. Sommer has gotten a many comments from Sahrawis praising him for his coverage and providing additional details about some of his postings. Sommer’s perspective is that Morocco oppresses the territory through its occupation.
• Le Sahara Occidental Occupe also reports on “occupied” Western Sahara. The perspective is definitely Algerian (which is pro-SADR), thus the French coverage. There is strong reporting on political developments, and particularly disturbing images of torture.
• Sahara Occidental – Western Sahara aggregates news and provides links in English, Spanish, and French. It includes links to news reports from Morocco, but takes the SADC side.
• Free Western Sahara is written by an ex-patriot who has never seen her homeland. It’s an aggregation of video and images of Western Sahara, and conveys a strong sense of nostalgia. Posts are in both English and Spanish.

Many of these blogs are from the SADR perspective. That certainly backs up the comment from GV. But I wonder whether this is an artifact of searching for “Western Sahara.” Are there pro-Moroccan blogs that would turn up under different search terms?

I find myself clinging to something that is likely to soon be a very outdated notion. I want to compose in Word (or really, just any decent word processor – Open Office’s version is fine). 

The concept of authoring an article for publication directly in design software is laughable. I’d just never do that. The programs are too flaky, they don’t allow you to track changes, they may not have spellcheck built in, and page views are just generally not set up to allow easy text editing. So I write in Word.

This is as true for print publications as it is for web publications. The site I manage at work is developed in Dreamweaver, and I just copy my text from Word and paste it into the relevant template. My graphic designer does the same thing for our print publications, copying the text of my articles from Word files into InDesign pages.

I’m realizing that’s so archaic. I’m currently evaluating several content management systems (CMSs). I want to transition my site out of Dreamweaver and into a rationally organized easy system that allows my non-technical users to enter and edit content themselves. And the CMSs all expect you to do your composition in their WSYIWYG editors which overcome all of those arguments I had earlier on.

I say expect because no-one has figured out a decent way to import formatted Word documents into a webpage without breaking your CSS. Essentially, if you just copy and paste from Word to your web-based editor, the formatting gets very weird. So the solution is simply to compose in your CMS.

And as I think about it, I agree. It really doesn’t make sense to compose in one program with the specific intention of publishing that text in another, especially when there are such big conversion issues. The added benefits of doing this are the workflow of approvals and publishing can be built into the system – no emailing files around and wondering who has the current version. This is streamlining the business process for composition and web publishing.

But I can’t get over the fear of my document getting eaten by the system. I want a soft copy backup on a hard drive attached to my computer. Even though I will make any post-pasting edits to the document in the CMS, immediately making my Word document out of date, I still want to know that I’ve got that backup. Even though the CMS will have rollbacks and redundancies, I still want to know I’ve got it on my computer. It’s completely irrational.

I think it’s a holdover from the days when documents did disappear. I often had power outages at home when I was a kid, so I got in the habit of saving my work every 30 seconds. Even then, sometimes the file was just gone. So the idea of composing a long, considered article into a form on a webpage is frightening.

The irony is that I am typing this directly into my WordPress WYSWYG editor in my web browser. It saves my work every 3 minutes or so, and I can hit the save button myself. I can undo and redo what I’ve typed, and I can view the document editor in full screen if I need to. I feel completely comfortable blogging in this space, but I’m not quite ready to take the plunge with the items I write for work. I’ll probably get it over it pretty quickly though…I’ll take anything that makes my life easier!

At first glance, Howard Kurtz’s column today in the Washington Post (Blogging Without Warning) gives a solid analysis of the impact of bloggers on the MSM. But by focusing on Mayhill Fowler – the blogger who broke both the Obama bitter comment and the Clinton scumbag one – Kurtz belies his position as a member of the MSM by consistently highlighting her lack of experience and training.

Kurtz’s descriptions downplay her efforts to cover the Democratic primaries, and seem to suggest she just got lucky – both times. Teferencing Fowler as “the woman” (something he does twice in the article), Kurtz writes:

“I have no journalistic training,” says the woman who spent the previous 15 years trying unsuccessfully to get several books and novels published. “I just discovered that I’m impelled to get out there and get the truth of the matter.” But that has required overcoming her natural reluctance to hurt her political side.

Fowler is part of a new breed — citizen journalist, liberal advocate, agent provocateur — and her success has stirred questions about her methods. Fowler freely admits she has donated to Obama’s campaign and started her blogging stint a year ago because she admired him.

Tying right back in with We the Media, Kurtz brings up a number of the issues forseen by Dan Gillmor as citizens have the same ability to publish as journalists. But really, how likely is it that the same bumbling “citizen journalist” would end up with the only recordings of two major players in the primaries as they make serious verbal flubs?

What I find most interesting about the Post article, is its end:

In an e-mail, Fowler says she has come to realize that her presence “flummoxes some longtime journalists — because suddenly here I am, unpaid but as a consequence with much more freedom to find out what’s going on out there, and writing for a new and encroaching media that is a Wild Wild West of lawlessness.” But she has also had to reexamine her own beliefs.

“Over time, I’ve become more like a traditional journalist,” Mayhill says. “I’m now much more skeptical and much more distanced.”

This idea is borne out by Mayhill’s most recent post on her blog (Running Behind the Bus), which explains what she’s been doing as a blogger for the Huffington Post for the past year. She is unique among bloggers in that she’s been following the candidates around from one campaign stop to the next. She also gets clearance to sit at the local press table, has daily deadlines for her editors at the HuffPost, and according to Kurtz’s column, gets fact-checked to some extent by those editors. While she is apparently paying her own way to follow the campaigns around, she otherwise sounds an awful lot like a press-pass carrying journalist.

This is an interesting development in citizen journalism, and one that wasn’t forseen by Gillmor.

Some other interesting coverage of Mayhill’s blog by the MSM and other bloggers include the NYTimes, LATimes, LATimes again, NewsBusters, DailyKos, and Gawker.