Blogging Conference Wrap Up

Timing is everything.  If the news out of Washington had been two days earlier, the military blogging conference would have been a celebration of finding and killing Osama Bin Laden.  Jim Dao was at the conference reporting for the New York Times.  His article talks about how military blogging has gone corporate.  Originally it was grunts reporting on the mess they were living through and in some cases getting shut down.

By the time I started blogging in 2007 some of the controversial web sites were already shutting down.  Many more family members are bloggers, which is a good trend.  Military families suffer a lot.  During a deployment like mine where my little physical danger threatened us, my family still had to wait for a year wondering if the war would suddenly turn for the worst.

But for those of us who served during Viet Nam and the Cold War, the whole idea of blogging, even if it has less of an edge than in 2003 is still way ahead of the controlled world of the 60s and 70s.  And really, many soldiers over 30 still don't know what a blog is.