[Dean's World] Dave Schuler: The Silent Blogosphere

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Posted by Dave Schuler:
The Silent Blogosphere
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1200408818.shtml


   For those of you (if any) who have been wondering whatever happened to
   the Carnival of the Liberated, the answer is simple: the Afghan and
   Iraqi blogospheres have been very, very quiet. With the exception of a
   few disinformation sites, there haven't been more than a dozen posts
   over the last couple of months in aggregate and most of those have
   been uninteresting in the extreme, of the "what I did at school"
   (without any details) or "I had a nice Eid" (again, without much in
   the way of details) sort.

   Even the ex-pats, to whom I don't ordinarily link, have been silent.

   I think there are a number of reasons for the quiet in the Iraqi
   blogosphere. Most of the first-line Iraqi bloggers have left Iraq. The
   Fadil brothers and Jarrar brothers are, I think, here. Riverbend is in
   Syria. Zeyad is in Jordan. Zappy is in the UK. The Mesopotamian is in
   Canada. They are, probably, too busy trying to get their new lives in
   order to post. Of those few bloggers who reamin in Iraq I suspect that
   electricity is sufficiently scarce that they're using it for something
   other than their computers and many are probably still concerned
   enough about safety that they're not going to Internet cafes to blog.

   I also think there's a tremendous sense of fatigue. They're just worn
   out.

   I'll keep monitoring the Afghan and Iraqi blogosphere and if there's
   anything I think you'd be interested in hearing about, I'll post or I
   may even cobble together the occasional CotL every now and again.