The OJR Hot List: Readers' top military websites

Hello,

Today, we’re introducing a new feature on OJR: the “Hot List.”

Hot Lists will be articles where OJR readers can post the websites they frequent — or better yet, that they have built — on a particular topic.

If you are an online news junkie like me, you love to discover new websites. Our friends at long-established news organizations like NYTimes.com do a great job, but many of us who publish our own websites, or who work for newsrooms with much smaller budgets that The Times’, take greater inspiration from reading the work of aggressive niche bloggers and Web publishers.

The Hot List is our effort to get OJR readers to share their bookmarks with fellow journalists, to submit their favorite URLs along with a short comment about what makes these sites so notable.

I know that there are plenty of social bookmarking websites out there. But OJR’s readership is special (if you’ll pardon my pride in you for a moment). You have a passion for online news, as well as an experienced eye for great online content.

Although the Hot List pages look somewhat like normal OJR articles, they are a bit different on the back end, allowing us to collect these URLs, website names and reader comments as fielded data. Hot List pages also will not archive, like regular OJR articles, so the lists will stay open for new links indefinitely.

As we build a few of these Hot Lists, we’ll be able to do some more creative things with the data, such as building topical directories and, potentially, allowing for ratings and reviews of listed sites.

But for now, I’m hoping just to get a healthy list of great URLs to start browsing.

This week’s topic: Military websites

Our first topic is “military websites.” We are looking for blogs, wikis and/or websites that cover the military, from the U.S. as well as other nations. What are the websites that are publishing smart, accurate and engaging information about military personnel, resources and issues?

Soldiers’ blogs, reference resources, discussion boards, military newspapers — all are the sort of publications we are seeking. (We are looking for ongoing sites devoted to the military here, not special packages from newspaper.coms or topical wire feeds that do not provide anything more detailed than one could find on hundreds of mainstream news sites.)

Please submit your favorite sites below.

And, thanks for reading — and posting to — OJR.