A blog from Afghanistan. Good news. Their voices are needed to fill the void left by the scores of mainstream journalists who left the country in disappointment after the failure of the Afghan election to fail.

A blogger’s first day in the White House press corp.

McClellan said Graff was believed to be the first blogger to be credentialed to attend his morning press gathering and his televised briefing later in the day. McClellan ran into Graff in the press room in the afternoon and greeted him as “the mystery man.” The two went up to McClellan’s office to chat.
On his blog, Graff wrote: “Our first impression this morning? As glamorous as the beat itself may be, there’s little glamour to be found in the briefing room. The conditions of the briefing room, famously built over the old White House swimming pool, um, leave something to be desired.”

Or read his own report, at DCFishbowl

I’ve been watching the debate developing this week around two closely related developments – mutterings about regulating blogs through Federal Election Commission and the fallout of the Apple case.

In a case with implications for the freedom to blog, a San Jose judge tentatively ruled Thursday that Apple Computer can force three online publishers to surrender the names of confidential sources who disclosed information about the company’s upcoming products. Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge James Kleinberg refused to extend to the Web sites a protection that shields journalists from revealing the names of unidentified sources or turning over unpublished material. …
The case raises issues about whether those who write for online publications are entitled to the same constitutional protections as their counterparts in more traditional print and broadcast news organizations.

Dan Gilmor;

I apparently stopped being a journalist the day I left my newspaper job after a quarter-century of writing for newspapers.

Drudge this evening:

FLASH: White House press corps admits its first ‘blogger’…Developing…

It’s bit early to know what this means, or if it’s even accurate. But if it is, could it be that the White House has decided to weigh in on the debate on behalf of the “citizen” press?
Stay tuned.
update – more info in the comments about Garrett M. Graff. (I was kind of hoping it would be Bill Ardolino….)

Some of the readers here know I also do a bit of blogging at James Joyner’s highly respected Outside The Beltway. Earlier today I crossposted the RCMP shooting item there.
James just informed me that OTB was accepted by Google News as official news source earlier this week, and that post is the first Google news hit for OTB.

Kevin Jaeger is going on hiatus.

I’m afraid I’ll be on hiatus for many weeks at least, spending time deep in secure network environments.
If someone would like to take over this blog let me know. I could make an occasional guest appearance some time in the future.

I can think of someone I’d like to see back.

As a result of past posts in which I’ve taken swipes at Canadian political and media types over their ambivilance/ignorance of the blogosphere and internet communication in general, I’ve been working behind the scenes with a couple of individuals who’ve expressed an interest in venturing into it themselves.
The learning curve is proving to be steep. For example, when explaining the pros and cons of opening comments, I’ve found myself explaining what a “troll” is. (“Now that over there, to the left, sir, would be your brake pedal”, said the driving instructor). What I wouldn’t give for a Usenet Wayback Machine.
I’ve discovered that explaining the blogosphere to an internet neophyte is rather like teaching a chicken to swim. All the time you’re carefully describing paddling technique, the intricacy of the currents, warning about the whirlpools and submerged rocks …. you secretly wonder if you shouldn’t just toss the round eyed, blinking thing into the water and offer encouragement from a safe distance.
The same way the rest of us learned.
That said, political types aren’t known for their risk taking behavior, so perhaps it’s more humane to direct them to this piece by Patrick Ruffini. He provides excellent advice in this post written specifically for politicians;

Blogging by political leaders has the potential to revolutionize campaign communications in this respect: it takes the press out of press releases. Blogs mean that politicians can communicate with constituents directly, without the media filter.
Yet powerful institutional obstacles remain, as evidenced by the fact that only 4 Congressional offices have started blogs. If you’re a communications director, chief of staff, or even a Member, and you’re looking to overcome internal opposition to a blog, consider this post your guide.

Oh. Who’s Patrick Ruffini?

Here in Canada, where bloggers are so blessed, where simple basics like connectivity and a healthy hard drive are taken for granted, there is a tendency to forget that others are not so fortunate as we.
Miles to the south, in a remote urban jungle, a CITIZEN JOURNALIST sits facing a darkened screen. The hard drive has fallen silent. The electrons vital to blogging that are so often wasted meaninglessly, have been cruelly denied him.
Look into those sad, dark eyes, the pain only partly concealed behind bloodspattered *, yellow-tinted glasses*.
Help end the suffering. Only you can bring back the Martha Stewart Chronicles. Only you can restore Ted Rall’s Internal Monologue. Only you can grow the facial hair he so longs for.
Give. So the rest of us can go back to ripping off his best stuff.

Well, so far the show has been successful, in a communal, if not a personal, sense. Which means everyone who came on the trip has won nicely, to the exclusion of my dog.
So far, high point has been an evening with Jeff Goldstein and friends at a small pub they located after directing me to meet them at one called “Heavenly Daze”… which turned out to be closed. No small feat finding a locked, dark warehouse type of building in a strange city, after dark, having lost the directions and the address. But all’s well that ends with several pints of Guiness and shooters.
Jeff is having a hard time remembering events after 10:30.
Heh.

I’m southbound tomorrow morning and will be gone for about a week. I’ll have the laptop but no guarantee of connectivity, much less time to dig up content. We’ll see what happens. In the meanwhile, visit the fine folks on the blogroll.

CTV News has been running a promo this morning advertising a feature on blogs, to be run on Thursday.
Now, as none of the well-known Canadian bloggers I read have mentioned being contacted by CTV (please send me links if you know of any), and the blurb includied the grim voice of a pychologist warning about the dangers of “revealing ones opinions” or some such crap, combined with the abysmal quality overall of CTV news reporting… I’ll predict the piece will lean towards a dismissive puff piece, heavy with “risks of” and light on factual integrity.
But I’ll be in the US when it airs, so hopefully a few folks will tune in with fisking fingers at the ready. That includes the readers here – even if you don’t have your own blog, consider sending me your impressions by email, and I”ll compile them in a followup post.
update – apparently this is a local news item. Doesn’t sound like it’s worth looking for outside Saskatchewan.

Recent events have convinced me that it’s time to confess that the little photo of a woman repacking the mufflers on a motorcycle is well… just a cleverly chosen image to increase blog readership.
So, in the interest of full disclosure…. (nsfw)

Google News wants no part of Jeff Goldstein. Or Michelle Malkin*. Or Charles Johnson. Apparently, these citizen journalists do not display a strong enough commitment to hard sodomy reporting.

Disappointing news – the decidedly undiplomatic and highly entertaining Diplomad blog is shutting down.

It’s been fun; the postings from the readers have been great (except for the idiot trolls — the same ones who collapsed our hotmail account and made it useless.) But for a variety of personal and professional reasons it’s time to stop (we might blog again under a different name; might not.) Lest any of you think so, we have not been threatened or shut down; the State Department goons are not knocking at the door. It’s just time to do something else.

The archives will remain up.
Hat tip – Right Thinking People, where the grief and sense of loss is translated into a nice smackdown of National Post “columnist” Sheila Copps. There’s the spirit, guys – take it out on someone unsuspecting, I always say!

An interview with Charles Johnson (Little Green Footballs).
Via Damian Penny

Monte Solberg (Finance Critic and MP for Medicine Hat) has started a new blog, named:

Well, no…. But I think we should all write him and suggest he consider it.
(I was going to go with “Paul Martin Has Poopy Pants”, until I realized that Warren Kinsella has already taken that.)
Good luck, Monte, and welcome to the blogosphere.

Just a reminder that Friends of Democracy is continuing overage of the post-election in Iraq, at least through this weekend.
Hats off to Michael Totten and friends on a job well done.

New York Times;

“In another presentation, Senator John Thune of South Dakota introduced senators to the meaning of “blogging,” explaining the basics of self-published online political commentary and arguing that it can affect public opinion.”

Tom Daschle could not be reached for comment.
H/T Wizbang

I’m having ISP problems this weekend, and finding it difficult to enter posts, so activity here may be light.
Don’t forget to keep up on Iraq election progress at Friends Of Democracy – it’s on the left, on the blogroll. Iraqis reporting from the ground, in Iraq.
update
Jeff Jarvis has a must read roundup of quotes from free Iraqis, as well.

Now, and thanks to other humans, not from my area, religion and who don’t even speak my language, I and all Iraqis have the real chance to make the change. Now I OWN my home and I can decide who’s going to run things in it and how and I won’t waste that chance. Tomorrow as I cast my vote, I’ll regain my home. I’ll regain my humanity and my dignity, as I stand and fulfill part of my responsibilities to this part of the large brotherhood of humanity. Tomorrow I’ll say I’M IRAQI AND I’M PROUD, as being Iraqi this time bears a different meaning in my mind. It’s being an active and good part of humanity. Tomorrow I and the Iraqis that are going to vote will rule, not the politicians we’re going to vote for, as it’s our decision and they’ll work for us this time and if we don’t like them we’ll kick them out! Tomorrow my heart will race my hand to the box. Tomorrow I’ll race even the sun to the voting centre, my Ka’aba and my Mecca. I’m so excited and so happy that I can’t even feel the fear I though I would have at this time. I can’t wait until tomorrow. – Ali – of Free Iraq

Liveblogging at Iraq Election Wire.

Michael Totten writes;

We have more than a dozen local Iraqi correspondents, at least one in each province, filing daily reports. These reports include news, interviews, quotes, photos, whatever they can get in a day. They aren’t professional journalists. They are more or less ordinary Iraqis. Some of them you already know – Omar and Mohammed from Iraq the Model, for example. Others you don’t know because they don’t speak or write in English. Their reports are translated from Arabic before
they are uploaded to the reports site.
My job isn’t to edit the reports, exactly (they are published raw on a secondary site), but to run a blog on the main site which summarizes, excerpts, and links to the reports from the field. I’m also going to be excerpting and linking to essays and posts in the Iraqi blogosphere and – on rarer occasions – stories in the mainstream and Middle Eastern media. The idea is to let Iraqis themselves tell their own story of their own first free election.
The site is called “Friends of Democracy: Ground level election news from the people of Iraq.” To the best of my knowledge there is nothing else like it anywhere out there, at least not in English. (We also have an Arabic site.)
If you have the time and the inclination, please give us a link.

Let’s get this into circulation, folks.
http://www.friendsofdemocracy.info/