The Googleplex Blog

Military intelligence

"Military intelligence" is a cliche of an oxymoron -- and, of course, not always an oxymoron because there are plenty of very smart people in the military. How do you find out what they are thinking? How do you find out what is happening on the ground in Iraq from the grunt's eye view?

The answer is that the universe of the blog has opening a portal into the soul of the hypothetical "every-person". A "blog" (or "web log"), of course, is a periodic web diary, with entries presented in reverse chronologic order. (Just like this one, heh, heh...)

Members of the military participate in the blog soul, thought, and opinion-baring just like everyone else. The researcher's problems lie not in finding these blogs, but rather in sorting through the multiplicity of them. Also, everything in a blog is just somebody's opinions and observations. Blog entries require even more validation than normal Web pages (which themselves can be pretty suspect, here are some tips for validating information found on the Web).

Blogs written by people who say they are members of the US armed forces range in tone from right-wing paranoid ("the US media is a vast left-wing conspiracy") to very caustic about American military command in Iraq. These apparent biases form something like the bell-shaped normal distribution curve. My impression is that the curve is heading a bit more towards the caustic, particularly among the reservists and national guard members who maintain blogs - but you should judge for yourself.

A good place to start finding these blogs would be a Google search like "US army Iraq blog" (you've got to make sure to put the US army first, or you mostly get opinions from Iraqis, and who cares about them?!)

Another approach is to go straight to the sites that specialize in blog aggregation. The best of these are Bloglines and BlogPulse. Bloglines provides a great way to search through a mass of blogs and RSS feeds. BlogPulse is more a specialty tool for understanding blog trends (an "automated trend discovery system") rather than an aggregator of blogs or feeds. As such, it is extremely useful but a bit crude: you can easily answer questions like how many times the term "military intelligence" shows up in the world's blogs, but it is (of course) harder to get an automated read on the tenor of a given blog's content.

Here are some specific army blogs:

• Boots on the Ground is written by a soldier serving in Iraq who notes at the top that his views "do not reflect those of the US Military or US Government," well duh!


• Line in the Sand, about operation freedom written by Sgt Missick, a member of the Signal corp


• My War: Colby Buzzell's blog entries about the truth about the war from the ground lead to a book contract -- he sure tells the military establishment where they can go and what they can do if they don't like his opinions


• American Soldier, a day in the life of an American soldier

Blogging has changed the way the world expresses opinions and blogging presents a window you can use to view the opinions of the world. This impact is huge, and I'll write about it more in another entry.

Nuancing the Curves

Phyllis passed me on a Snopes link about the Curves exercise chain and its founder Gary Heavin. Curves is the largest exercise franchisor in the world. Its "shops" are aimed at middleaged over-weight out-of-shape women. According to the Snopes article, a rumor has been going around the Internet that Curves founder Heavin donates 10% of Curves's profits to radical-right anti-abortion causes. The top of the Snopes piece marks this rumor as "True." Phyllis's reaction: boycott Curves. (I was going to editorialize: "We like curves in the right places, not in the wrong places"...but maybe I shouldn't go there!)

Snopes is generally a reliable source. But to get to the bottom of this story, and understand its nuances, you need to read the full Snopes article, not just the top sound bite. There is no doubt that Heavin is a man of Christian convictions who takes an anti-abortion stance. Heavin, it turns out, one year donated 10% of his income (not Curvse's profits) to charities, conceivably including some anti-abortion causes. This is his personal money, not Curves money (or the money of Curvses's franchisees). (You want to make money as a Curves franchisee? Click here to see Curves's franchises for sale.) There's no hard evidence that the man regularly gives this much to charity, or indeed that the charities include causes offensive to women.

According to Heavin's account of his life, as a thirteen-year-old boy caring for his younger brothers, he woke one morning to find his over-weight mother dead in bed. This set him on a life-long mission to help women become more physically fit.

One can only applaud the goal of the Curves franchises, and their apparent high rate of success. I'd prefer that wealthy patrons like Heavin not support obnoxious causes like the anti-choice movement, but (for the most part) this is still a free country, and I am not the opinion gestapo. The moral? As a researcher, at least read the full story and checkout the background info.

More on PR Web

One other comment about PR Web (see previous entry).

From a researcher's perspective, how valuable are all those press releases on the PR Web site? It's a little like wading through a blizzard of home pages: interesting stuff that you could spend hours going through, but little information of clear quality. Some kind of high-level analysis tool using this stuff as raw data might really be cool, though.

California Pioneers

Phyllis and I drove across the Bay Bridge to MacWorld at the Moscone Center in San Francisco today. We had six-month-old Mathew with us, so (as three people) we got to use the car pool lane, which was very nice, scooting around all the traffic at the toll Plaza. MacWorld was really hopping with enthusiastic people and great gadgets, but that's not what I want to write about.

Just a block or two from Moscone Center we passed the Society of California Pioneers. Turns out that it has a research library. the Alice Phelan Sullivan library.

Alice's library features diaries from the 1848 Gold Rush, photos, old sheet music, holographic autobiographies of California pioneers, and much more.

Here's where I'm going with this. Google's recent announcement that it will be digitizing portions of the Stanford, Michigan, Oxford and NY Public libraries is just great, and a good start. But what about all the little, specialized archives in the world? There's no research substitute it seems -- at least yet -- to being there in the physical sense. If you want to really look at the primary source material at the California Pioneer Society, you have to go there (and, yes, it is only a couple of blocks from San Francisco's Moscone Center).