While it’s OK for a journalist to snap photos and speak his mind about what’s happening on the ground in Iraq (see Kevin Site’s Blog), this National Guardsman’s honest talk about his experiences there have reportedly drawn the ire of THE MAN. BoingBoing reports on the demotion of guardsman Jason Hartley due to refusal to obey a command (stop blogging) and violation of OPSEC (operational security). Read his email about the whole process, and check out his blog – it’s a very good read.

This is a site update. I’ve added a pretty slick feature to Trotz.com, a set of (for now) four headline aggregation pages, implemented with the spiffy PHP program ‘zFeeder‘. Listed on the left rail of most pages of the site under ‘B L O G R O L L’, these pages assemble RSS feeds from some of my favorite sites. It’s a whole lot easier to check out these sites here, and visit headlines I’m interested in. Check them out, and let me know what you think.

The categories include:

DailyGeekOut: Sites like BoingBoing, Engadget, Gizmodo, TheFeature, Screenhead, etc.
News Feeds: Includes feeds from CNN.com and SI.com (where I work), The New York Times, The Boston Globe, etc. Easy way to glance at the top news of the moment.
Mac News: As a big Mac-geek, I need my daily dose of Mac news, tips and rumors. So here it is. Macslash, TUAW, etc. Good stuff.
MCE Feeds: I’ve been fooling around with Windows XP Media Center Edition for a while now, so this page lets me keep up with The Green Button, various Microsoft employee blogs, and hardware/software news from the gadget sites.
Continue reading RSS Madness →

Google blogged yesterday regarding a new initiative they are leading with the support of the major blogging software developers to implement techniques to block comment spam. This will be achieved through the use of a ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ tag in links. This will ultimately reduce the value of spamming our beloved blogs and hopefully stem the tide of these efforts. Until this is implemented, I’ll still rely on the wonderful MT-Blacklist plugin. It rocks.

The photographer who captured what could be the Eddie Adams moment of Gulf War II has posted a personal explanation of those events, addressed to the members of the squad he has been working and living with for many months. ‘Kevin Sites | Blog‘ is a must read, offering insight into not only how a journalist must function in a war zone, but into the human side of this conflict. Now, in what is reportedly the first New York Times news story built entirely around a blog entry, the Gray Lady is covering this report (free registration required) in detail in today’s edition.