Communicator (communicator) wrote,
Communicator
communicator

On blogging

William Gibson had an interesting entry in his blog on Tuesday. About 'Salam Pax', the Baghdad blogger, whom everyone has heard of now.

As you probably know, various people have asserted that Salam is a hoaxer. Gibson (and I) doubt this. His argument is that the various 'intelligence' or 'special interest' communities are not alert nor creative enough to have faked this, because they are only just cottoning on to the potential that this kind of source offers for propaganda and counter-information, and to have faked Salam's log would have taken back-preparation months in advance.

(I don't doubt that they would be prepared to put in the work, only that they would have anticipated the need to do so).

The corrolary is that the most alert members of these groups must now have caught on to this potential. Which means that from now on it is increasingly likely that blogs will be faked with national-political (as opposed to personal-nutty) ends in mind.

I still think we'll be able to spot them. But then we can spot spam can't we, and that doesn't really make it any less annoying.
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