The Nielsen Wire reported earlier this year that about 60 percent of people on Twitter end up abandoning the service after a month. That hasn’t been the case with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Admiral Mike Mullen joined Twitter this past April and he’s been engaging his followers on a regular basis since then. He even announced the launch of his Facebook page on July 2nd via Twitter. Here’s a look at some of his recent tweets:
Spoke with students from the Junior Statesmen Foundation. They asked very informed, insightful questions. They are our future.
12:44 PM Jul 24th from web
Heading to a press conference in one hour (2pm) with SecDef on the Pentagon Channel or follow live @ www.pentagonchannel.mil
12:48 PM Jul 20th from web
Arrived home last night, terrific trip! Rich in experience and feedback.Troops proud of difference they are making, and I am proud of them.
6:00 PM Jul 19th from web
Visited with Marines in Helmand yesterday. They truly understand counterinsurgency, not one civilian casualty. Protecting the Afghan people.
9:17 AM Jul 18th from web
Conditions in Pakistan IDP camp I visited are good, considering heat and numbers of people. Well-led by Lt Gen Nadeem. Still more to do.
11:33 AM Jul 16th from mobile web
So far, Admiral Mike Mullen has only managed to follow 2 people back out of nearly 4,000 followers, though. I dunno, I’m guessing he’s pretty busy with work and stuff.
By the way, I follow everyone back in case you just joined Twitter. I’ve found it’s a great way to meet new and interesting people online...Like Tatiana the talking, tweeting dog. I nearly peed my pants when I checked out her tweets...
...So glad you think I'm cute -- I WUV your smile!! I have two big Bengal cats that I play with. Woof!
Genius! Although I must say, I'm growing suspicious that a human might be behind this whole thing...a dog that can correctly spell 'strengthen', 'intuition', and 'errands'? Clearly, I got cheated at the pet store. I'm staring at my dog right now, and I'm pretty sure he just farted. That's the extent of his talent. *Patting Ruffles on the head - "DADDY is so proud of you, YES HE IS*.
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When the Seattle P-I stopped publishing its print edition, not only did it shutdown Seattle’s oldest business, but it also shutdown its Military/Veterans Affairs blog. The Seattle P-I, did keep its website running at seattlepi.com, but failed to keep the blog going. Fortunately, the original author decided to keep the blog running on Blogspot. Here’s what the author has to say on Now Hear This - the new home of the military blog:
This blog picks up where the military/veterans affairs blog I wrote for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ends. After 25 years at Seattle PI, I was among the more than 150 people laid off when the newspaper closed its print edition, and with it the military/veterans affairs blog "Now Hear This." Quite a few veterans asked me to keep it going but I had important family business to pursue. My dad, an Army retiree, finally passed away July 5 from complications due to dementia. I spent 25 years at the PI, including a stint covering the Green River serial murders. I served a hitch in the Marines 36 years ago, receiving an honorable discharge with a service connected disability. I spent 15 years as an Army brat, a tough upbringing I would not trade for the world. I have a degree from Penn State and studied at Boston University and UPenn. I also attended seminars at the Army War College and the Institute of Strategic Studies. As a reporter, I tried to focus on the human element of those who serve and their families. I'll try to keep this going and do justice to all of you who selflessly serve and served.
You’ll be happy to hear that the Seattle P-I has several other blogs running on their website still, including The Cat Lady. You really can’t help but wonder what they were thinking. Cats, people. Not cats that talk or even cats that do arithmetic or do household chores while you're at work. Just lazy good-for-nothin cats. Sorry Mom, just saying.
This is almost as bad as running a blog dedicated to rabbits or cheeseburgers.
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Lieutenant Colonel Kevin Arata, Director of the Online and Social Media Division of the U.S. Army, has been working since January of this year to build up this social media presence, according to a Facebook blog post last month.
And their efforts may already be making a difference.
Read the entire story here.
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In an attempt to reduce the amount of spammers on Twitter, Twitter purged spammers from their database late last week. You probably noticed a drop in the number of followers if you have a Twitter account. My Twitter account had over 1,000 accounts dropped, allegedly all spammer accounts. I know it’s not easy to clean up spammers when you’re talking about millions of accounts on Twitter, but many of the military spammer accounts that readers have reported to me through Twitter, are still ‘active’ like @ArmyWivesClub. It’s unexplainable that Twitter didn’t drop this account along with others, but one of Twitter’s downsides is their customer support, in particular their inability to investigate and respond to issues reported by legitimate users.
A word of warning, I don’t recommend clicking and following the links that @ArmyWivesClub has posted, unless of course you like to flush your money down the toilet or like to invest in stocks that go down.
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Below is an excerpt from an article that David Marron wrote which discusses military bloggers. The article will be appearing in an upcoming newsletter from The National Museum of Americans in Wartime. The museum should be one of the first military museums that not only features authentic landscapes of war that allow visitors to interact and get a real feel for how conditions were during wartime, but the museum will enlighten visitors with firsthand accounts from men and women in uniform – using ‘new media’ including stories from military bloggers.
In April, my family and I had a chance to visit the World's Largest tank farm in an event hosted by the museum after the Milblog Conference. My kids even got to drive in the tanks, which was awesome, but now I can't drive in traffic without one of my kids asking me why I don't drive a tank instead of my car. I know I know, silly question...
Although in my 3-year old's defense, he still poops in a diaper and thinks that Grandma's Ford Escort is a real-life Transformer.
(The Thunder Run) They mean everything to us. What more fitting a phrase than to describe the mission of The Museum of Americans in Wartime as they seek to not only tell the stories of our Veterans and those currently in service to our country but also those who “serve” on the home front. We must tell their stories not because they are important, for they are, but because they mean everything to us and the inclusion of bloggers in the museum is a vital link in the outreach in which the museum will find itself in telling those stories and thus Educate those that follow, Inspire a new generation and Honor those who have gone on before us. I can’t think of a better mission to be involved in and I hope that we can have a long and lasting relationship for there are millions of stories waiting to be told.
Read the entire story here.
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"Winding back through five years though, I do have a failure or two. I never got CDR Bluebeard to blog. After his CDR Command, he left active duty and never looked back. Long story I am not at the liberty to discuss - but a huge loss to the Navy. I also overreached a couple of times my first year and had to delete posts and apologize to people I pinged on wrongly. Blogg'n has a learning curve, especially as an anonoblogger. It is easy to do things out of character if you are aren't careful, and it takes a good self-editor to keep you on centerline and trust in some of your loyal readers' advice as an idiot check. I also got a bit too mean now and then, but that was the exception and I like to think that I only did that to those who deserved it. Never blog angry or tired, remember other people's agenda - and always have more than one source before you blog on a tip. Those were the early lessons of '04 that I hope I hoisted onboard.
I have also tested the envelope on what I should blog about as an active duty officer. I try to avoid the CINC (both this one and the other) as much as I can - though I think policy is fair if done right, and we all need a sense of humor..."
Read the entire story here.
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Read the entire story here.
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These are the first of many poignant words written in the diary of Pte. William Harold McPhee, an Orillia soldier from the First World War who will become a poster boy of sorts for a pilot program at the Simcoe County Museum.
The museum has acquired a collection of artifacts that belonged to McPhee. A postcard, bugle, medal and the revealing diary are among the collection, picked up a couple of months ago by the museum's education director, Tim Tully, at a collectibles show in Toronto.
Read the entire story here.
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Read the entire story here.
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The Web new site, at www.defense.gov, will be a complete overhaul of the site that now exists, said Les Benito, public Web director at DOD’s Defense Media Activity office. The site will include new modes of user participation, and interactivity will be a driving factor in the site’s shaping, he said. Benito outlined the plans for the new site at the Open Government and Innovation Conference in Washington.
Users will be able to post questions for high-ranking military officers or the defense secretary, give their own feedback about DOD services and take advantage of other similar interactive features, he said.
Read the entire story here.
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Here's another great story by Jon Anderson over at MilitaryTimes.com, this time about troops tweeting from the frontlines. The world is abuzz with Twitter. Call it a hunch, but I think we’re going to see more and more troops tweeting instead of blogging in the very near future. Thanks again to Jon, a staff writer at MilitaryTimes.com for publishing these stories.
Here’s an excerpt from the article:
In a recent post from his forward operating base on the frontier of Pakistan, Air Force Senior Master Sgt. Rex Temple details the trials and tribulations of the Afghan National Army troops his unit is assigned to train in a blog he calls “My Last Tour.”
“Prior to departing for ‘ANA land’ we received information that several hundred soldiers were sick and it might not be a good idea to visit today,” he wrote in a July 13 posting, complete with pictures of gut-clenching, pasty-faced Afghan soldiers.
If you were among the 440 people following his Twitter postings July 9, you would have read this simple missive: “How 2 tell 8-yr-old Afghan boy 2 keep faith that we’ll succeed in Afghanistan while he has 2 live w/ Taliban; poor kid.”
He writes that his wife has to handle the nuts and bolts of managing the blog — assembling pictures and posts from his e-mails. Internet service is too spotty at his forward operating base to do it himself, but it’s good enough for his regular Twitter shout-outs.
Read the entire story here.
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Matt Gallagher the author of the military blog Kaboom is writing a book based on his war experience and only a small fraction of the book will be based on his original blog. That's right, 99 percent of the book will be completely new material. I’ve been covering Matt’s blog Kaboom since it was abruptly shutdown, as well as the news of the book deal, so it's been exciting to track his activities as a milblogger. I asked Matt to share some information on how the book deal came about, and here’s what he had to say in his own words:
Well, after the WaPo article came out about Kaboom last July, a few literary agents and publishing houses contacted me, seeing if I was interested in turning the story into a book. I decided to sign with Wm Clark Associates, a literary agency, who brokered a deal with Da Capo, a publishing house. We got back from Iraq in late February, and I finished writing the first draft about a month ago. The book should be out by spring 2010, at the latest, possibly earlier...
It’s awesome to see military bloggers going beyond blogging into publishing and other opportunities.
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I received news earlier today about Sesame Street unveiling a website to help military families with young children stay connected. All due respect to Sesame Street, I probably won’t sign up for the site but I will pass the Press Release along to my readers.
I would have my 3-year old write up a review from a kid's perspective, but it hasn't worked out too well before. I had him try to write up a review about MilitaryKidsblog.com, but he mostly just stared at the computer and picked his nose. Then complained he was poopee.
In continuing efforts to support our military families with young children and help them stay connected, feel reassured and comforted, Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization behind Sesame Street, unveiled the Sesame Street Family Connections website and today rolled out thirty five “Sesame Rooms” across the United States. These new resources are part of Sesame’s ongoing Talk, Listen, Connect (TLC) initiative, which provides support and offers significant resources for military families with young children experiencing the effects of deployments, when a parent returns home changed due to a combat related injury and the newest phase announced today, helping children cope with the death of a loved one. The announcements were made by Brigadier General Loree K. Sutton, Director of the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury, Patty Shinseki, Member of the Board of Directors of The Military Child Education Coalition, Gary E. Knell, President and CEO of Sesame Workshop and Sesame Street’s Elmo and his Dad today at the Military Child Education Coalition’s (MCEC) National Conference.
In continuing efforts to support our military families with young children and help them stay connected, feel reassured and comforted, Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization behind Sesame Street, unveiled the Sesame Street Family Connections website and today rolled out thirty five “Sesame Rooms” across the United States. These new resources are part of Sesame’s ongoing Talk, Listen, Connect (TLC) initiative, which provides support and offers significant resources for military families with young children experiencing the effects of deployments, when a parent returns home changed due to a combat related injury and the newest phase announced today, helping children cope with the death of a loved one. The announcements were made by Brigadier General Loree K. Sutton, Director of the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury, Patty Shinseki, Member of the Board of Directors of The Military Child Education Coalition, Gary E. Knell, President and CEO of Sesame Workshop and Sesame Street’s Elmo and his Dad today at the Military Child Education Coalition’s (MCEC) National Conference.
Here’s a link to the site here.
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Needless to say, it’s a great read and my good friend CJ from A Soldier’s Perspective is a feature part of the story.
Thanks to Jon the MilitaryTimes.com reporter who interviewed me while I was picking up takeout from Cairo Grill. He even asked me about Twitter and gave me some ideas for Military Twitter Hashtag hacks, like #yourface and #sand.
Unfortunately, those little pearls of wisdom didn’t make the story. Pffttt.
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"I'm going to be Tweeting [and] blogging to be able to connect externally as well as internally throughout the command," said Brig. Gen. Reuben Jones, in an interview on Monday with Nextgov.
"If we can get them to be a friend," that presents a chance to help, added Jones, who starts on July 30 as commanding general of the Alexandria, Va.-based Family and Morale, Welfare and Recreation Command. The command provides support and entertainment to soldiers, Army Department civilians, retirees, veterans and their families.
For his new job, Jones is learning terms such as Tweeting and "being on the blogs," he said, to connect with Army families and their support network through the broadcast text-messaging service Twitter.
Read the entire story here.
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Katie is a senior at American University in Washington, D.C. and came up with the idea to start a blog after she took a new media course. "I read a lot of articles on how political campaigns, charities and social activism organizations were learning to use new forms of media like Twitter, Facebook, texting and blogs to get the message out."
Read the entire story here.
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Social media and the military, gotta love it. I received an email earlier this week from Mary Elizabeth Sisk on behalf of the U.S. Army Accessions Command, who pointed out that Colonel Timothy Kopra is one of four active active duty Soldier astronauts in the U.S. Army’s NASA detachment, and right now he’s in outer space at the International Space Station. The U.S. Army has a great website setup where you can send him questions about the International Space Station [click here] and he even has a Facebook and Twitter page.
Unfortunately, I just checked his Twitter page, and there still haven’t been any updates since he blasted off. But if he does tweet from space, it would pretty much make him the most awesomest Twitter of all time.
Yes, even more awesome than Ashton Kutcher's Twitter account that has eleventy bajillion followers... Sorry ladies.
Here’s a copy of the email that was sent to me if you’d like to learn more:
Early Wednesday evening COL Kopra began his first mission to space, heading to the International Space Station aboard the space shuttle Endeavor. COL Kopra is scheduled join Expedition 20 as a flight engineer after traveling the ISS with the STS-127 crew. Throughout the mission, COL Kopra will be sharing his story about what it’s like to be a U.S. Army Soldier aboard the ISS.
You can watch COL Kopra explain how the Army helped him prepare and train for the mission here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3Dj0x1-nog
I’d also like to share the opportunity for you and your readers to submit questions to COL Kopra while he is in space. Questions can be submitted to COL Kopra by visiting http://www.goarmy.com/space.
Facebook users can become a “fan” or learn more about the U.S. Army Astronauts here: http://www.facebook.com/usarmyastronauts.
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A local Wisconsin paper has launched a military blog, to keep readers updated about a local Army unit that is deployed to Iraq. Alpha Company 132nd BSB, is based at Camp Bucca, in southern Iraq. The first post was made on July 14th and it has 26 comments already. Here’s a note from the Editor:
A National Guard unit based in Janesville is now working at Camp Bucca, Iraq, near the Kuwait border. Camp Bucca one of several places where U.S. and other coalition forces are holding prisoners. Like the rest of the U.S. troops in Iraq, these citizen soldiers have a tough job to do during a time that the United States is gradually turning over its operations to the Iraqi authorities. Following is the first of what we hope are many blogs by the members of Janesville's Alpha Company.
I don’t know much about the paper, but I love how more and more local papers are running blogs, particularly military blogs. It’s a nice touch and a great service for the community, especially for the family and friends of those deployed.
Thanks to my longtime pal Wendy for the tip, who I met through my first blog in 2004. Wendy and several folks who I met online while deployed back to Afghanistan have stayed in touch with me and my family through the years and it’s been a blessing to have such good supportive friends. And honestly without great folks like Wendy, I would have like 1 friend... *High Five Mom!*
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Suzane Smith who runs Court Report Schools contacted me to let me know Milblogging.com’s Twitter feed was chosen by them as one of the ‘100 Best Twitter Feeds for Your Political Education.’ *wipes tear* If you go to their website you can see the full list of Twitter feeds picked. I have to be honest though, I’m not sure why Milblogging was selected in a Political list. Seriously, it’s like choosing me for the ‘100 Best Twitter Feeds for Your Rocket Science Education’.
This is a questionable list though, considering Eminem ranks higher than me ‘for Your Political Education’. C’mon, I don’t care if I was just a box of rabbits with a Twitter account, having Eminem rank higher than me even then, would hurt me deep.
Oh s-w-e-e-t Jesus, is that Justin Timberlake ranked higher than me, too?! *throws up in mouth a little*
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