Small Wars Journal

Actually, the Army Kind of Likes Your Blog

Wed, 04/28/2010 - 4:37pm
H/T to Crispin Burke at Wings over Iraq for pointing us to Actually, the Army Kind of Likes Your Blog by Noah Shachtman at Danger Room.

You'd think all the criticism from left-wing websites like the Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Salon would royally piss off the Army. But at least one Army report finds the sites' posts to be consistently "balanced."

Every week, the defense contractor MPRI prepares for the brass a "Blogosphere and Social Media Report," rounding up sites' posts on military matters. It's meant to be a single source for top officers to catch up on what's being said online and in leading social media outlets. Items from about two dozen national security and political blogs are excerpted, and classified as "balanced," "critical," or "supportive." The vast majority of the posts are considered "balanced" - even when they rip the Army a new one...

Included in the post are links to three of these reports: week of March 20th, week of April 3rd, and week of April 10th. More at Danger Room.

Comments

I can hardly wait for the analysis of this week. Top trends HAVE TO include:

1.) Gripes about PowerPoint
2.) Troops dancing like Lady Gaga
3.) Mocking US Cybercom's badge

Seahorse (not verified)

Fri, 04/30/2010 - 3:34pm

To extend the effects, LOE, LOO acronym banter; in 2006 ISAF HQ developed a set of Commander's Priority Effects based on the ISAF Campaign Plan Lines of Operation titled "Commander's Lasting Intended Effects". As it turned out, from an effects based approach, calling them LIEs was fairly accurate.

Chuck Chappell (not verified)

Thu, 04/29/2010 - 12:04pm

@Starbuck-

LOE is being replaced, kinda, with "LOO"; Lines of Operation. Only the British seem to get the joke.

Starbuck,

Very humorous. As for lines of effort, see the first link given on a Google search of the words "lines of effort":

http://www.captainsjournal.com/2008/03/03/center-of-gravity-versus-line…

They could have found it, although not recently. I see that there are no other entries on this subject. And as for your site recently, On Combined Arms was useful:

http://wingsoveriraq.blogspot.com/2010/04/on-combined-arms.html

Of course, none of this is included, and as you say, this is mostly opinion-oriented stuff. Maybe they don't care about lines of effort and combined arms. Maybe that's what they're after. Who knows? It would be interesting to learn the criteria.

Honestly, spend ten minutes reading SWJ and you'll have twenty-five links to other sources. Read Ricks for half that time and you'll have another several dozen. Hell, Thunder Run and Dawn Patrol do all the aggregation work for whoever's writing those reports, on a daily basis no less.

That's why I suspect their internal tier system is substantially flawed--even making the distinction between "news providers" and "commenters" doesn't really do justice to the relatively small number of blogs they refer to. and certainly seems to display a remarkably limited knowledge of the community and the many resources available.

My inner researcher winced hard when I read the reports. Not the least because of how weirdly self-referential it was.

It would be absurd to leave the SWJ out of the list. They could only use it as a starting point to help them. On another front, I find a bit of amusement in their classification of the Huffington Post as balanced. I don't think that's how they would classify themselves, any more than Daily Kos would. But whatever.

Well, that leaves SWJ out then, as many do not identify us as a military blog and we are not "categorized" as such. The blog aspect is secondary to our other efforts. And on edit, from the Blogrank FAQ you apparently register a blog with them to get ranked, but I could be wrong there.

Also, the only blog associated with the MSM is ABC News Political Punch. I don't think I can name one MSM organization that does not have an associated blog - most have many and many of those are related to national security issues.

<i>I wonder if the analysis of their analysis on DR and SWJ and so forth will show up in next week's "Other LoE"? That would be meta to the max.</i>

Hmm, interesting thought, if enough blogs pick up on it - or at least the ones they follow - how could they not? - Dave D.

of note as well was the sourcing--relying primarily on technorati ranking, boolean searching in Google Bloogs, and blogs found "through extensive research." It's clear they have a ranking system that isn't outlined (hence reference to Tier 1 blogs--guess we know who should win those Webby awards now!) but the research, given the sample size and reference list, seems to be rather limited.

I wonder if the analysis of their analysis on DR and SWJ and so forth will show up in next week's "Other LoE"? That would be meta to the max.

I love the bar chart, too.

Lines of Effort:

Equipping: 4 articles
Policy: 2 articles
Other: 3432394838409328094 articles

I really wished LOE died with EBO :)

Rex Brynen

Wed, 04/28/2010 - 5:14pm

I'm not at all surprised that the Army is following the blogosphere.

I am bemused by how very poorly done the content analysis and reporting is done in the actual contractor reports. You know someone has poor methods to hide when they're reporting statistics in colourful pie charts to two decimal places... on a sample of only c60 blog posts per week, with no attempt to weight the relative influence of the blogs (or to sample the many important ones that are left out).