Steven Levy takes on blogs, war, and con­ven­tional media in Newsweek today. (Minor point, but let’s ditch the Newsweek-style spelling “webloger.” Y’know: log­ger … weblog­ger … weblog­ging. Capiche? Excerpt:

Per­haps it was inevitable that this war would become the break­through for blogs. The big­mouths of the so-called Blo­gos­phere have long con­tended that the form deserves to be seen as a sig­nif­i­cant com­po­nent of 21st-century media. And in the months pre­ced­ing the inva­sion, blog­ging about the impend­ing con­flict had been feisty and furi­ous. But it wasn’t until the bombs hit Bagh­dad that Weblogs finally found their moment. The arrival of war, and the frus­trat­ingly var­ie­gated nature of this par­tic­u­lar con­flict, called for two things: an easy-to-parse overview for news junkies who wanted infor­ma­tion from all sides, and a per­sonal insight that bypassed the san­i­tiz­ing Cuisi­nart of big-media news editing. …

Even some of the sol­diers have been blog­ging. An Amer­i­can offi­cer call­ing him­self L.T. Smash presents sharp obser­va­tions from his bivouac and some misty-eyed patriotism.

The role of pro­fes­sional reporters is another mat­ter. One blog­ger, free­lancer Chris Allbrit­ton, used his site to solicit $10,000 from read­ers to fund a trip to blog from the north­ern front. (He’s just arrived in Turkey and will be in-country soon.) The BBC has a blog, and a Seat­tle Post-Intelligencer reporter has been using a blog to describe her stay on the USS Abra­ham Lin­coln. But when CNN reporter Kevin Sites’s bosses found out he’d been blog­ging his expe­ri­ences on an unaf­fil­i­ated site, they told him to stop.

CNN’s response was seen in the Blo­gos­phere as one more sign that the media dinosaurs are deter­mined to stamp out this sub­ver­sive new form of report­ing. But judg­ing from the tele­vi­sion and print reports from jour­nal­ists embed­ded in mil­i­tary units, there’s another way to look at things. Con­sider the reports from embed­ded jour­nal­ists work­ing for media insti­tu­tions. They’re ad hoc, using quick-and-dirty high-tech tools to pin­point the real­ity of a sin­gle moment. They are shaped by the per­sonal expe­ri­ence of the cre­ator rather than gath­er­ing news from after-the-fact inter­view­ing and doc­u­ment col­lec­tion. They are deliv­ered in the first per­son, cre­at­ing a con­nec­tion with the viewer that some­times bull­dozes over the deeper real­ties of the events.

In other words, they’re a hell of a lot like blogs. Not the heav­ily linked Weblogs like The Ago­nist or Instapun­dit but the per­sonal accounts of Salam or the thou­sands of blog­gers who use the tech­nol­ogy to keep a run­ning diary of their activ­i­ties for a small cir­cle of friends’or any­one who cares to lis­ten in.

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.

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