I’ve been out of the loop with the whole milblogs community lately until today when I randomly came across an article in the Boston Herald that began with this line:

“When something good is happening in the military, you can rely on someone high up and behind the lines to try to kill it. Slowly. Bureaucratically. Bleed the life out of it. That is what is happening to milblogging, the Internet phenomenon that lets soldiers in Iraq tell us what they see, do and think.”

My first thought was, “Geez, where have I been?” I didn’t know there was a group of National Guardmen out there whose assigned task is to browse military blogs searching for OPSEC violations. (How do I sign up for that job?!) The author seems to think that milblogs are nearing a group death because he closes the article with a couple links and suggests you “discover the world of milblogging while it still exists”.

I don’t read any Iraq-based blogs or even follow the well-known sites like Blackfive and Mudville Gazette anymore so I have no idea what’s going on. Is the quality of writing deteriorating? Or more accurately, is the substance of it deteriorating if people can’t write as freely as they used to? Anybody noticed…?