So many viewpoints, so hard to connect

The war in Iraq has begun. The all-out online coverage has begun. Where should you turn? More importantly in these initial hours of conflict, which pages will actually appear on your computer, with so many like-minded surfers hitting so many sites?

Going online here in Thailand during what is the middle of the night in the U.S. East Coast, I had no problem with the sites run by the BBC, CNN and Google, but more trouble with MSNBC and Fox News. Sites for The New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and Los Angeles Times were all accessible. Of course, this may all change as Americans log on in the morning and at work later in the day.

I also noticed that these newspaper sites, which usually bombard me with pop-up ads, had stopped this practice today, with NYTimes.com running no ads at all on Iraq-related stories. CNN.com was only promoting its own Breaking News emails in banner ads, while Washingtonpost.com still had ads on its front page.

No one should exploit war for profit, or should they? "This could define how future wars are covered," Mitch Gelman, executive producer of CNN.com, exulted to USA Today. This could go down as the "Internet war," reaffirmed MSNBC.com's editor-in-chief Dean Wright to CBS MarketWatch's Bambi Francisco, in a story detailing how the news sites have prepared for war traffic -- and how they might profit with pay video. Contra Costa Times' Ellen Lee explained how news sites have done so well in the runup to war, and warns that military sites have already strained under heavy traffic (yes, this story itself took a long time to load).

Blogging from the front

After weblogs went through the fire of Sept. 11, a subgenre of "warblogs" bloomed in the ambling preamble to this war. Now comes weblogs straight from the war front. CNN correspondent Kevin Sites has been doing triple duty, filing reports from Iraq for CNN TV, writing "behind the scenes" features for CNN.com, and running a marvelous multimedia weblog on his own site, complete with photos and audio reports.

MSNBC.com's Bob Sullivan ran a nice roundup of the few weblogs inside Iraq, including a passing mention of competitor Kevin Sites' site. He gives more play to a group of anti-war activists who are reporting for ElectronicIraq.net, and their struggles to stay online amid air strikes. Most curious is the "Where is Raed?" weblog, with posts mainly from someone named Salam Pax, who says he is in Baghdad and includes eloquent discourses on war and how people are dealing with it. Sullivan says he couldn't independently confirm that this man was indeed in Baghdad though his images and accounts seem valid.

I noticed that Pax's weblog was updated as I was writing this column, with this report after the initial "decapitation attack": "Now that was really unexpected. When the sirens went on we thought we will get bombs by the tom load dropped on us but nothing happened, at least in the part of the city where I lived. Aircraft guns could be heard for a while but they stopped too after a while and then the all clear siren came." Then he took a drive through the city. This seems like more interesting commentary than anything on the cable networks right now.

The BBC has showed the way for the mainstream media, with a great group weblog from correspondents all over the Middle East and the war front. You almost feel like a TV producer, reading their personal emails on the moods in Northern Kuwait, Syria, Northern Iraq, and beyond.

As for the numerous blogs not on the front lines, I've found the one by Jeff Jarvis for NJ.com to be one of the best, with a rat-a-tat of links and comments that come fast and furious. The independent Back to Iraq 2.0 provides views from a veteran journalist, Christopher Allbritton, who was hoping to raise enough money from readers to get to Baghdad for the war.

The local perspective

Here where I'm working in Haadrin, on the Thai island of Ko Pha Ngan, the town is blanketed with Net cafes and restaurants with satellite TV dishes, catering to Western tourists here to dance at full moon raves. This morning was different, as TVs that usually show bootleg movies or a Thai version of MTV were now showing war scenes via CNN World or the BBC. Tourists from various countries -- Germany, Sweden, the U.K., France, Israel, Japan, the U.S. and others -- gathered around to listen to the updates.

As I walked through town, I noticed that some restaurants were sticking to their schedule of movies while others showed the news. For the most part, people gathered to watch the news while movies played for no one (Ali G's movie was a notable exception). The Net cafes were more busy than usual, with many people gawking at news sites in various languages before logging onto Hotmail or instant messaging. One source of news here that's almost non-existent is newspapers, with one stand selling out its small allotment of Bangkok Posts by late morning each day.

Most Thai people seemed less concerned with the war, and a good amount of tourists still flocked to the beach or avoided TV altogether. Despite the presence of so many Internet and satellite TV connections, people generally come here to get away from the world's troubles -- instead of drowning in them.

Glaser Online regularly combs the following sites for links to pertinent stories: OnlineJournalism.com, IWantMedia, Romenesko, PaidContent.org, Google News and AltaVista News.