Military blogging goes mainstream

A long, long time ago — in the year 2003, to be exact — when Facebook was a gleam in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye and twittering was still for birds, blogging was the now thing. For troops heading to war, it was a revelation.

Through personal blogs, they could send letters home to friends and relatives in a single dispatch. They could mock commanding officers in ribald, and anonymous, prose. They could describe combat with the immediacy of Ernie Pyle, without the filter of actual editors. Many discovered that thousands of strangers were reading their posts.

A new genre was born, milblogging. By 2007, there were thousands of military blogs, written by not just troops in Iraq and Afghanistan but also parents, spouses and veterans. They even had their own aggregator, Milblogging.com, created by an early practitioner, a soldier named Jean-Paul Borda.

But in the years since, the military blogging world has changed considerably. There are fewer blogs about combat today and many more about life back home. And the Pentagon, which once tried to control or even shut down bloggers, has now joined the social media craze. Generals blog, the armed services all have Twitter accounts, and scores of company and battalion commanders maintain Facebook pages.

What once had the hint of sassy independence or even underground rebellion has gone mainstream. Nowhere was that clearer than on Saturday, when Donald H Rumsfeld, who as secretary of defense was widely thought to look upon the early military blogs with skepticism, and perhaps horror, addressed the Sixth Annual Milblog Conference here. “I can say I appreciate what you do,” Rumsfeld, 78, told bloggers gathered in a hotel conference room. “But I’m not sure I understand it.”

The conference — run by Milblogging.com, which is now owned by Military.com, which is in turn owned by Monster Worldwide — gave a good taste of how military blogging has evolved.

The Army Reserve, the Marine Corps and the Navy sent representatives to extol the virtues of social media. Lt Gen William Caldwell, an early advocate of blogging, fielded questions from Afghanistan. And in the audience, there were as many women as men, unlike the earlier male-dominated days.

Though military families have long used blogs and social media to share experiences, blogs by military spouses may be the main growth area in the military blog world. There are hundreds of them, with new ones popping up each week.

©2011 The New York Times News Service