I filed a radio report today for the NPR News program "Day to Day" on news that Pentagon officials are cracking down on "mil-bloggers," military men and women who write blogs about their wartime experiences. The Pentagon is concerned about operational security. The increased scrutiny has quieted some blogs, while driving many to look for ways to follow the new rules.
Link to archived audio.
See also this related story I filed for Wired News: "Under Fire, Soldiers Kill Blogs" (BB post, WN link).
IMAGE: The author of milblog "Midnight Casket" is 25-year old Alabama native Jeff Barnett, shown here. He is a mechanical engineer with the US Marines most recently deployed in Fallujah, Iraq. Jeff is also a huge gamer, and particularly into XBOX360 and Halo. Check out this cool gaming forum he hosts: Link.
More on the milblog story in this Defensetech.org post Link (editor Noah Shachtman has been covering the story for weeks, and first pointed me to it).
My NPR News colleague Steve Proffitt reads an incredibly moving personal account from one soldier's blog in a segment which also aired in today's edition of "Day to Day": Link.
UPDATE:
Some of the "milblogs" mentioned in the Wired News item and NPR report are organizing a fund drive to buy voice-operated laptops for Iraq war veterans and other servicemen/women recovering from amputations or injuries to arm or hands. They load these notebooks up with copies of Dragon Naturally Speaking (which I have not used, but heard great things about from reporters who swear by it for transcribing interviews). Snip:
Operating laptops by speaking into a microphone [allows them to] send and receive messages from friends and loved ones, surf the 'Net, and communicate with buddies still in the field without having to press a key or move a mouse. The experience of CPT Charles "Chuck" Ziegenfuss, a partner in the project who suffered severe hand wounds while serving in Iraq, illustrates how important this voice-controlled software can be to a wounded servicemember's recovery.
Link to one milblog with info on the "Valour IT" project, and here is the project home page: Link, and here's their blog. Looks like donations are tax-deductible, too: they're a 501 (c)(3).
