Read the entire story here.
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(The Tennessean) Many in Brentwood, including his parents, Susan and Randy Campbell (Randy is the chairman of the Brentwood Planning Commission), kept up with the 2002 Brentwood High School graduate through his online war journal, Alan's Adventures, at vtgringo.blogspot.com
Peppered with photos and videos of battle scarred vehicles, citizens putting their country back together and even his Afghan counterparts sampling a very American treat of S'mores, the written blog began soon after Campbell was deployed in August 2008. But Campbell hasn't updated it since returning home.
Read the entire story here.
And you can check out Alan’s Adventures here.
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Fortunately, many soldiers are also more than capable writers. Their writing is fluid; they know and understand how to construct paragraphs that move the reader; and they have a compelling style. But there are others who have a more difficult time. While their experience may be interesting, the overall book fails to hold together. It's not their fault altogether; I place the blame on either an editor who wasn't tough enough, an agent who wanted to ride the crest of the latest trend, and a publisher who just didn't care.
Read the entire story here.
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U.S. Navy Petty Officer William Selby is on one of the Pentagon's YouTube channels, inviting anyone, and everyone, to post a video question for the senior U.S. military officer, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen. Social networking has been largely a young people's domain, but the 62-year-old admiral has embraced it.
Read the entire story here.
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Greetings from New England. Yes, I too am at the beach. But I'm still working, and the purpose of this brief is to tell you about a new project that the Lexington Institute has launched while you were away. It is a defense blog. Yes, yes, I know -- there are already hundreds of defense blogs, and many of them are pretty awful. But that's why we launched our own blog on the Lexington homepage, called Early Warning. It isn't awful. In fact, I'm betting that if you read a few entries, at some point you'll say -- "Gee, I didn't know that."
We all recognize what the main problem is with blogs. The barriers to entry are so low that almost anyone with a laptop can start one, and it's hard to sort out the good ones from tendentious nonsense. For every interesting, competent effort like DoD Buzz, there are dozens of ill-mannered rants masquerading as insight. To say that blogs have lowered the standards of public discourse on policy matters is an under-statement -- there are no standards. Anybody can say anything, with extra points for verbosity.
We are trying a different approach. First, we intend to keep our postings brief. It will be a rare day indeed that a posting on Early Warning runs as long as this brief, and the typical posting will run to two or three paragraphs. Second, we plan to be long on facts -- especially little known, useful facts -- and short on opinions. I mean really, why should you care what I think about the Bradley infantry fighting vehicle or V-22 tiltrotor unless I have inside information to impart? And third, we intend to write about national security in a somewhat more expansive manner than most military analysts. We will frequently look beyond the realm of strategy and tactics, to dissect economic trends, political developments and technology breakthroughs that have a material bearing on national security.
Obviously, we do not expect this vision of a world-class web-log to spring spontaneously from the collective consciousness of the Lexington braintrust onto the Internet. It will take some time to get the blog right, including all the material that surrounds it at lexingtoninstitute.org. The blog has actually been up and running for over two weeks, and we are still tweaking features such as how the postings display and are written. But we think we're off to a good start, and are already getting indications that people in the defense community have noticed.
We want Early Warning to be an island of sanity in the chaos of the Worldwide Web. With so many traditional news outlets declining and no new hierarchy of credible sources yet emerged, we'd like to offer a site that is both sensible and engaging. We will never match the resources of the New York Times or the reach of the Associated Press. But we hope that when you read something on the Lexington blog and say, "Gee, I didn't know that," it will be because the information is new and not because it is wrong.
Just what I’ve been waiting for Loren B. Thompson Ph. D.
Seriously though, I could give a four-year old a laptop and they could write a nicer story introducing themselves to the Milblog community than the Lexington Institute. The four-year old wouldn’t even have to be a person. My pet rabbit Beaker would do. I particularly like the fact that Loren doesn't allow comments on his blog. I’m guessing the Doctor assumes we won’t have anything intelligent to say...
That, or he's just happy that we were able to make it to the computer without catching ourselves on fire accidentally or something.
I mean, I'm pretty sure most of you could figure out how to add a comment on a website. Provided you have a PhD, that is.
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(The Atlantic) A Pentagon review of security and Twitter and other social media sites will be finished by the end of August, with recommendations due in September.
(Across the pond, Twitter has become a bit of a fetish for the U.K. Ministry of Defence, which encourages soldiers to tweet, reasoning that it is a safe and inexpensive way for those deployed overseas to keep in touch with their friends, family and community.)
Read the entire story here.
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If you watch the video, Noah Shachtman from Wired’s Danger Room who first broke the news about the possible DoD ban on Social Networking sites, appears in it a few times. I’ve chatted with Noah by phone and email over the years going all the way back to 2005, but never had a chance to meet him in person and I’ve never seen a picture of him (until now). I must say, he reminds me of a young Roger Moore... I’m guessing when he’s not busy writing a blog, he probably go to bars and drinks vodka martinis (shaken, not stirred).
Then flies off in his rocket-pack...
I hear big companies send you rocket-packs and car-planes to test-drive all the time when you write a "National Security" blog.
Note: By the way, Noah is currently in Afghanistan for about a month and plans to blog as much as he can.
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(Birmingham Post) Neville Chamberlain’s diary from 1939 is to go on public display, with the day the bloodiest conflict in human history began marked with a simple entry scrawled in pencil: “War declared.”
The diary is part of the year-long Outbreak 1939 exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London, marking the 70th anniversary of the start of the Second World War on September 3 1939.
Read the entire story here.
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DefenseLINK the official site for Department of Defense has a rotating feature on their home page about Social Media. There’s even a quote on the website from David Jackson, the Director of Defense Media Activity, where he discusses a recent trip overseas and his experience with being unable to access sites like Twitter from a government computer.
When I had some time between meetings in Okinawa, I used the detachment's desktop to see what would happen when I tried to visit Twitter and Facebook and some blogs that I like to read. I was denied access to all of them.
These restrictions are a topic of much discussion these days in the Pentagon, and I'm hopeful that there will be some changes that will allow the DoD users that we serve to access, and interact with, the content that we have been putting on these kinds of sites.
You can read more over at DefenseLINK. The page also includes links to several featured articles about the DoD and Social Media. You can also check out their interactive Social Media presentation [screenshot above]. And I have to say, it’s like the DoD went out of their way to make the most beautiful presentation of Social Media widgets on a single web page, ever. It’s kinda cool. Right up there with a handpainted unicorn jumping over a rainbow.
I'm pretty sure you're required by law to incorporate Care Bears into your design when you use that many pastel colors. My wife glanced at it and said it would be the perfect design for a scrapbooking page. Or maybe a cross-stitch pattern...
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(ExecutiveBiz Blog) Recently, we all heard the US Marine Corps banned the use of Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace for its active soldiers. So far, the reaction is mixed. “Banning such innovation seems like an archaic, knee-jerk response and I imagine in the not-to-distant future the militaries of [a] country like the US or UK would have more success embracing social media, rather than a blanket ban,” writes Dan Leahul over at Brand Republic’s daily blog. Meanwhile, Jennifer Jones writes that the ban comes on the heels of a report late last year from the 304th Military Intelligence Battalion at Fort Huachuca in Arizona; it outlined how Twitter could be used as a tool for terrorists. So, where does the current ban leave future efforts to integrate web 2.0 into the military? For the latest snapshot on the issue, which we last reported on here, we turned to Bill Chaplin, a vice president and the US Marine Corps account director at EDS. Here’s his take.
More here.
Pentagon Officials Say: 'We Want to Hear From You'
(dvids) Defense officials at the Pentagon have redesigned the Defense Department Web site to use social networking tools to engage the American public -- particularly 18- to 24-year-olds. "We need to embrace these technologies. We need to use them because that's what the young people use these days. We need to communicate with them," said Price Floyd, principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs. People between the ages of 18 and 24 are much more likely to communicate using Twitter and Facebook than they are traditional communication tools, Floyd told the American Forces Press Service, the Pentagon Channel and DoDLive Blog Talk Radio.
More here.
Dear DoD, the Web Itself is Social
(O’Reilly Radar) A few weeks ago, Noah Shachtman of Wired's Danger Room blog wrote about how the, "U.S. military is strongly considering a near-total ban on Twitter, Facebook, and all other social networking sites throughout the Department of Defense." According to Wired, the DoD believes that social networks, "make it way too easy for people with bad intentions to push malicious code to unsuspecting users." In April of this year, Mark Drapeau and Linton Wells II (previously the acting CIO of the DoD) published a thirty-five page report titled Social Software and National Security: An Initial Net Assessment which looked at the interplay between social software and national security. Combining a few of their conclusions, social software, "is an important information sharing enabler between individuals within government, between government employees and communities of interest, between researchers and government data, between the government and its citizens, and between governments of different countries" and that while, "information security concerns are non-trivial" that, "there is a point at which a mission can be hurt by strictly enforcing such draconian approaches that it keeps government from taking advantage of social tools that adversaries and other counterparties are using."
More here.
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Mike Redding sparked this idea last Wednesday, and by Friday it was global on Twitter and Facebook. The idea was simple: post a Tweet or Facebook status update supporting the troops, all at the same time on noon EST Friday. Here’s the story straight from Mike’s blog:
It’s hard to find the words this morning…. our first ride on the Gratitude Wave was awesome… the experience was thrilling and poignant all at once. And I say our first ride on the Gratitude Wave because so many of you have said “let’s do it again.” And we will. As many of you know, this started with the news that four NC soldiers were killed in action in Iraq the Monday before Independence Day. Fast forward to yesterday, thousands and thousands of people across the Carolinas, the United States and around the world joined in a sea tide of thanks that became the Gratitude Wave. Yesterday at noon, we watched the FB statuses reflect words of thanks. We saw Tweets of gratitude start rolling. Both Anna and I had tears in our eyes and down our cheeks. We feel so thrilled to have been a part of it. All of you who read StopandSmellthePeople took this little wave that could… over the mountain and back again. Thank you!
A special thank you to our friends in the media who brought attention to the Gratitude Wave: WBTV, WBT Radio, WCNC, TimeWarner Cable News14, The Charlotte Observer, WLYT 102.9.
Somehow, I completely missed this event, but this past week I haven’t been online that much. Some might scratch their head at the name of Mike’s website, “Stop and Smell the People”, but there’s actually a great story behind the name. Telling stories that matter. Including stories about the troops.
I mean, personally, I don’t like to stop and smell people so I’m glad Mike doesn’t mean literally stop, and start smelling someone. That’s a pretty sure way of getting punched in the face. And honestly, I’d rather smell something a little more appealing like a garbage bag. Or mold.
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The war diary of a Second World War British Army corporal Jack Gillespie was found inside an exercise book by his son. The Telegraph ran the article this week. Jack Gillsespie took part in the Allied invasion of Sicily and the book of poems and observations looks to be amazing from what I’ve been able to find online. Apparently, in between fighting, Jack would write. His poems were actually passed around the soldiers in his Company to help boost morale.
Here’s an excerpt from the book called “Poetic Journal of a Cameron Highlander”:
We were the forward section. The dawn came up and two kids moaned about 'wasted time' and home.
"Within a few minutes the two little white-armed lads of 18 were dead - As far as I could tell these lads had seen nothing of life, a couple of drunks and a night out or two.
"Now let us count our blessings when the time comes that we survived so much longer.
According to History Into Print the company that published the poems and observations:
Jack Gillespie was born in 1909 and celebrated his 100th birthday on 4th August 2009. In his youth he enjoyed sports and keenly participated in cricket, athletics and particularly boxing.
Belonging to a Scottish family in Liverpool, Jack, not unexpectedly, joined the Liverpool Scottish Regiment (10th Bn. King’s Regiment) as a territorial; spending his holidays each year at the camps in the Isle of Man and Catterick. This regiment acted as a feeder battalion for the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders. After the outbreak of War, Jack carried out his Army training in Edinburgh and saw action in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, Bulgaria and Austria.
When time allowed and there was a break in the fighting, Jack wrote many poems to help raise the morale of his colleagues in ‘A’ Company. These writings, which were passed around the rank and file, contained poignant and subtly placed words in rhyme – which though acceptable in this format, would otherwise have found him put on a charge by his superior officers. To mark his 100th Birthday this book containing all his surviving war poems has now been published.
The book is called a ‘Poetic Journal of a Cameron Highlander’ and you can get more information here. Today, there are quite a few military bloggers online who have kept ‘electronic diaries’ of their wartime experience. Me included, and I also had a chance to document my Iraq experience on video [Bad Voodoo’s War].
I’m not going to get into specifics, but 70 years from now if my kids stumble upon some of my stuff, I can’t imagine any of my writings will be a shining beacon of culture or hope. Or will they?
Sending generic brand goods to a Soldier is worse than taking a dump in a cardboard box and shipping it over…
For those of you interested in how to send a care package the correct way, here’s a link. And also here’s a link to a website of things that soldiers need. Just saying.
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"I'd rather be out in the field," he quips, "not sitting at the computer."
But even this battle-tested commander admits that soldiers today are online more than on patrol. If he's going to lead them, he needs to be able to reach them.
At a leadership conference in Boston two months ago, Linnington and two dozen other Army generals were "encouraged" to socialize online.
Read the entire story here.
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Jack Holt, senior strategist for new media in the Pentagon, said the Pentagon set up its Web 2.0 Guidance Forum last month to gather just this kind of feedback.
Read the entire story here.
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Even as debate over social media policy swirled in the Department of Defense this summer, someone tapped out this tweet:
"Obviously we need to find right balance between security and transparency. We are working on that. But am I still going to tweet? You bet."
The author?
Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (follow him @thejointstaff).
Read the entire story here.
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The National Guard has launched new brand channels on My Space and YouTube. They also have a Facebook page here. My good friend Keith who works at Iostudio sent me an email earlier in the week to let me know about the National Guard’s new brands online. Impressive.
While taking a look at each site on MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook, I noticed The National Guard was able to get the vanity url 'nationalguard' at each of those social networking sites (for example, Facebook.com/nationalguard), but they weren’t so lucky with Twitter (only the fastest growing website on the internet with millions of users signing up each month). They had to settle on @MyNationalGuard. The Oregon National Guard beat them to it. That’s okay though, The National Guard still has options. I mean, call me crazy, but doesn’t the Head of the National Guard Bureau outrank the Head of the Oregon National Guard?
I’m pretty sure the Head of the National Guard Bureau could just walk into Oregon’s main headquarters and make the General do like fifty pushups. Or, a million. Maybe call him a Soup Sandwich...
Just saying. It could work.
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My good friend Kathi sent me this story earlier about the DoD setting up a site to solicit input from the public regarding useage of Web 2.0 capabilities. If you ask me, sounds like the DoD got some pressure on them because of the recent news since this site only went live recently. Either way, it’s great to see the DoD reach out to the public to see how important Web 2.0 is for families, friends and the general public who rely on these sites to stay connected with members of the military.
Hopefully though, the DoD will also educate people not "in-the-know" about the dangers and real-world threats that hackers pose on military networks by allowing access to these types of social networking sites. It might help prevent news organizations and others who have been having a knee-jerk reaction to stories about possible bans on sites like Twitter and Facebook by the DoD.
For the record, I didn't use military computers when I blogged from Afghanistan or Iraq. And today, I don’t have access to any of these social networking sites at my civilian job. Yes, it's very tough to go more than an hour without tweeting...
Luckily I have Outlook and can send work-related emails. I’m sure my coworkers love those special emails from me [under 140 characters]:
@Burt @Ernie @Mary-Kate @Ashley we have mtg 2day at 4'clock .. bring ur work tinyurl.com/poop RT @Boss dont be late #Meeting #Monday High5
According to the About Page on the DoD Web 2.0 Guidance Forum website:
The Department of Defense (DoD) Web 2.0 Guidance Forum is a new initiative to solicit input from the public that has been undertaken in the spirit of President Obama’s Open Government Directive. President Obama issued a memorandum on 21 January 2009 entitled, “Transparency and Open Government,” which emphasized the need to ensure public trust and to establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. We are using this blog as an approach to engage the public in Department of Defense (DoD) considerations of web 2.0 capabilities, and are excited to participate in this new facet to the President’s openness and transparency efforts.
You can go here to provide your own feedback. Thanks again to Kathi for all the hard work submitting new military blogs to the Milblogging.com database and for always providing me with great tips on new stories.
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Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn III directed a study of social media sites — including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube — in hopes of establishing a policy by October, according to Associated Press reports. The study is being done to address security challenges and the communication value the sites have to the DoD.
Until the study is complete, there is not a department-wide ban of social networking and Web 2.0 tools, though restrictions may occur due to bandwidth or security concerns, according to the AP.
Read the entire story here.
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An Aug. 3 Marine message called the social networking sites “a proven haven for malicious actors and content,” and officially prohibited Marines from accessing them from work computers unless a waiver is granted. Just three days after the message was released, Twitter was hacked and shut down for a few hours, illustrating how susceptible such sites are to attack.
Read the entire story here.
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The 13-page document (PDF) is similar to the one published by Neil Williams, the head of corporate digital channels at the department of Business, Innovation and Skills back in July for public servants.
In it, MoD personnel are encouraged to talk about the role they play but "within certain limits to protect security, reputation and privacy".
The document also suggests the introduction of sponsored blogs for various services to describe what they do on a day-to-day basis. These would require official approval and would "work best if they focus on that individual's contribution to the wider effort".
Read the entire story here.
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