While we’re on the subject of news and blogging. I came across some articles on CNN about blogging related to the war in Iraq.

The question of course is … can these blogs be trusted as a source of news? Both sides seem to be actively blogging about the war. There’s the case of a much-talked-about blog from a guy called “Salam Pax”, claiming to be a 29-year-old architect living in Baghdad ( “Salam” and “Pax” both mean peace in Arabic and Latin respectively, in case you’re interested). Pax is blogging about the bombing, life in Bagdad and his family’s reactions to it all … the only thing is, how do we know this is for real? It probably is, but how would we know for sure? If you’re interested, go visit his blog on his blogspot or just do a search on google for “Salam Pax”.

Another interesting part of the article is about the bloggers that work for the big news companies themselves, like CNN for example. Quoting from the article: “CNN Correspondent Kevin Sites was chronicling his experiences in Iraq until last Friday. According to his Web site, he is “Pausing the war blog, for now.” A CNN spokesman told The New York Times the company believed the blog was a distraction from his reporting duties.'” Well, so much for blogging the news. I guess he had to stop it because CNN wasn’t getting any advertising dollars for his blogs. Hey, it’s the tough laws of economics. 😉

Another interesting one is “soldier blogging”. Have a look at sites like www.blogsofwar.com, www.sgtstryker.com, www.rooba.net/will and www.lt-smash.us … interesting alternative news sources. Well, if you can call it news of course, but hey, someone’s venting an opinion (let’s hope it’s not the dog). Seems they’re even faster than CNN sometimes. Betcha CNN doesn’t like that … maybe they’ll have to stop doing it too, start fighting some more and get CNN advertising dollars?