The evil Bush-hater Lisa Rein has video and audio files from the alleged Warblogging panel at the O’Reilly Etech conference on her blog, but I can’t recommend them to anybody who knows what a warblog actually is. The discussion is moderated by spiky-haired peroxide punker Xeni Jardin, who was dedicated to keeping the discussion mired in personal trivia such as whether consumers want to know more about the personal lives of journalists. The star attraction, Stuart Hughes, is a BBC producer who lost a foot in Northern Iraq and talked at great length about his semi-conscious decision to share the details of his physical therapy on his blog. Hughes confesses that he didn’t know what a warblog was until after his personal journal had been linked by some blogs.
Seldom do you get deep insight from a panel at a computer show talking about social issues, but this was lame even by the most generous standard. Had the panel been more inclusive – open, that is, to actual warbloggers – it might have been different, but O’Reilly wants to keep geeks in the dark about these things.
Warblogs aren’t the only thing she’s not covering accurately: see http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=84546 . I guess the Constructivist graphics just weren’t enough to win her heart.