Dress Rehearsal for the First Blogged War

Blogging on breaking events, often as original reporting, was just hinted at in the invasion of Iraq but has come of age in the campaign to defeat insurgents and terrorists in Iraq.

Winds of Change calls the Lebanon Crisis the first blogged war. I guess this is true in a sense. But Kosovo was the first Internet war. Yet it was too short to really show the new powers of the Internet. We had to wait until the Iraq War to see the Internet really used to cover the war. I suspect that we won't see the full impact of a Blogged War in this crisis. My guess is that the Iran Campaign will be the first Blogged War. And it will be blogged even from inside Iran as the fighting goes on. I guess the only question is whether the Lebanon Crisis expands into the Iran Campaign or whether the campaign to overthrow the mullahs begins separately on our timetable.

Like every other ramping up of news technology, it will seem to overwhelm our ability to comprehend and make the prior methods seem slow and plodding--and providing time for thinking about the events.

This is a trend that has been going on ever since the telegraph and the Crimean War at least.

We can see the next step. What comes after blogging wars?