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 Greetings! You are reading an article from The Mudville Gazette. To reach the front page, with all the latest news and views, click the logo above or "main" below. Thanks for stopping by! October 12, 2005 Open PostBy GreyhawkNo picture, just a few words. The purpose of the Open Post is (hopefully) obvious. Those with something to say can link their blogs here and those readers who are interested can follow those links to the source. This whole inter-linking thing is what the blogosphere is all about. Given that Mudville is a fairly large blog, we?re pleased to offer an opportunity to help the blogosphere grow - a goal we've been committed to for some time. Because our purpose has always been to send readers to other blogs, we've never been overly concerned with the few who game the system and create a trackback link here without actually including a link to this post in their respective post. This is, of course, a breech of blogosphere etiquette, but not one I previously felt was worth noting. However, wiser folks have convinced me I was wrong. Those who do provide a link to this post actually send a few readers here too. Those readers in turn are likely to read something else in the open post. In other words, they keep the cycle going. Those who create trackbacks here without actually linking do not - but they aren't cheating Mudville as much as they are cheating the other folks who post here. Not only that, but this post is designed to display only 21 trackbacks before the new ones start replacing the old - so there's a double foul - when someone freeloads they probably bump someone else off the list. So henceforth that's a red card offense - and any post that doesn't actually include a link to the open post will be deleted. Any repeat offenders will likely be banned permanently. This is no problem for the vast majority of folks who link here. For the remaining few, please feel free to play by the rules henceforth. Your fellow bloggers will appreciate it. Have at it gang, Mudville is yours. Posted by Greyhawk / October 12, 2005 9:44 PM | Permalink 34 TrackBacksJosh Marshall, in a recent Talking Points Memo, reveals the revisionist history that underlies both \tilt and Nobel sensibilities. Read More Goes to Republican Indiana State Representative Patricia Miller. Read More We must begin by saying that, like so many Americans, we really love and admire Laura Bush. But this line that “it’s possible” that sexism is playing a role in the opposition to the nomination of Harriet Miers is just plain insulting... Read More Today’s engine of despotism? The Islamofascist jihad. Much as they try, the UN and the Anointed Liberal Elite will not quench our nation’s will to win the Gobal Wr on Terrorism, and to spread freedom in the process. ... Read More The American Family Association reports that the popular brand American Girl (owned by Mattel) has partnered with Girls Inc., a blatantly pro-abortion group, through the sale of the "I Can" band. Read More I posted last Saturday on Congressman Tom DeLay and the fact that he and his legal team are fighting the charges brought against him by out-of-control, partisan, grand-jury-shopping, movie-wannabe, Texas prosecuter Ronnie Earle. They filed charges of ... Read More There has been speculation in political circles about the possibility of Al Gore making one last run for president in 2008. The AP is reporting excellent news on that front: Read More On the fifth anniversary of the U.S. S. Cole attack, this post pays a brief tribute; and links to some outstanding posts remembering and honoring the dead, the wounded, the survivors, and their loved ones. Read More Faced with flagging poll numbers in general and a divided base over his Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers in particular, President Bush announced early this morning that he intends to open up the strategic oil reserves located in the Read More UNICEF is running an antiwar ad in which they bomb the Smurfs. Yeah, you heard me right. They send in the bombs and blow those little blue bastards back to the stone age. No word on whether they were the actual target or perhaps just collateral damage ... Read More Only the Navy can make its own birthday dull. Read More I have linked there and intended to edit my article to include a link, but became sidetracked and never got it done ... GUILTY! Read More Hat tip NIF for pointing me to WND O.K. Folks, we’ve got 18,000 signatures on our petition to stop taxpayer funding of the ACLU in support of Hostettler’s Freedom of Expression Bill. Looks like a larger organization has beaten us to the ... Read More In August, I brought you the story of one Marine mom who was working to bring Beans the Dog to the United States. Her son, Lance Cpl. Jeff Boskovitch, was killed in Iraq. She wanted to hug the last thing that her son had hugged before a sniper claimed ... Read More The Director of National Intelligence released what he said was a letter from al-Zawahiri to al-Zarqawi. Like most news organizations, the Washington Post glossed over it and relegated it to Page A-13 but it is encouraging because it shows the U.S. is ... Read More The Cole incident is one of those things you don't forget about, but I'd forgotten it's been 5 years today. Black Five and Michelle Malkin reminded me. John Donovan keeps his tribute short, but eloquent. Click here. Smash: We Read More In an opinion piece Bernard Haykel (Assoc. Professor of Islamic Studies at NYU) says: The West needs to understand that reasoned debates take place within jihadi circles and that such reasoning can change minds. Read More SCREW YOU, DOUCHEBAG LOSER! Full story over at Romeokat’s, pic from Darleen. linked at The Mudville Gazette ... Read More Every now and then we'll get a spam EMAIL offering us the opportunity to advertise using the greatest, most cost-effective marking tool ever-- spam! Of course, the power of spam is that there's no obligation to be truthful. Even so,... Read More Like many teenagers, sixteen year old Shaukat Shah wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary on Saturday. He was fighting with his older sister, Fadela, in their small stone house, when a deadly 7.6 earthquake struck in the Himalayan region of Kashmi... Read More Quote from this Associated Press article: 'The Ohio Civil Rights Commission has ruled a sign in the window of a southwest Ohio tavern declaring, For Service, Speak English, is discriminatory.' Seems that some folks from a group called Housing Opportuni... Read More Today's dose of NIF - News, Interesting & Funny ... and remember the USS Cole Read More Chris Muir has done it again, as you'll see from his cartoon for today: As you may - or may not - remember, back in August (the 22nd, to be exact) Kos said (oh, and that's a link to lgf's Read More Ok, I've been asked, and while I don't know that my opinion is too valuable on this subject I do have a few thoughts that seem to be unique. The Harriet Miers nomination.....complicated if you decide to read all the blog posts on the topic. I've read m... Read More Jack & Charmaine with Dr. Dobson & Mrs. Dobson On his radio program this morning, Dr. James Dobson said that he feels confident about Miers' future performance on the Supreme Court and that she should be hired confirmed. His... Read More You take the flag, march it to the flag pole, call the commands and fly the colors. A member of the color guard for Marine Light Attack Squadron 167, Lance Cpl. Nick R. Baham, a Denver native, has done it a hundred times. However, on Oct. 10, it was ... Read More Nothing like smearing the names of millions of our servicemen and women that endure hardships completely unknown to the civilian world, like lengthy overseas separation from family and friends, or that whole waking-up-knowing-someone-is-going-to-try-... Read More Just imagine what it would be like if people felt like a constitution -- the founding document of the nation-state -- was something "living," so to speak, something people could "amend" whenever they felt like it...it'd be a worthless piece of paper!... Read More I didn’t know Cpl. Stalbey, nor did I know his family in Conroe (the Merillats). But I understand what kind of man he was, and I am thankful for his service and ultimate sacarifice for our country. ... Read More So what gives? My theory, as far as the Velcro goes, is that it was just a dumb idea that got pushed through because someone important thought it up. Read More More and more the concept a liberal education in America is being replaced by an education by Liberals. These liberals hide behind the ideas of free speech and academic integrity to protect the non-sense spouted by the likes of de Genova and Churchil... Read More I know about TQM and "off-sites." They are special in their own way. Anyhow, it seems the Dr. Demming methodology has been adopted by the terrorists and al-Zarqawi reports he got a memo... Read More From the port of Um Qasr to the highlands of Zahko on the Turkish border, the people of Iraq face a historic day. Tommorrow as millions of Iraqi citizens flock to the polling places, they have a choice before them that no Arab state has ever put to its... Read More I noticed last month that my Blogpulse Profile page was no longer staying up to date. According to them, my last post was on August 25th. I sent an e-mail asking if something was up on their end or if there was some problem on my end. I finally got... Read More 14 Comments |
November 26, 2010America@war [Greyhawk]
I think anyone who's ever pondered the "comment" option - once only available on blogs and bulletin boards, now ubiquitous on almost any web site - will appreciate this:
The so-called faculty of writing is not so much a faculty of writing as it is a faculty of thinking. When a man says, "I have an idea but I can't express it"; that man hasn't an idea but merely a vague feeling. If a man has a feeling of that kind, and will sit down for a half an hour and persistently try to put into writing what he feels, the probabilities are at least 90 percent that he will either be able to record it, or else realize that he has no idea at all. In either case, he will do himself a benefit. That's wisdom from the past, captured for posterity at the US Naval Institute, shared via the web on the institute's 137th anniversary. From their about page:
"The Naval Institute has three core activities," among them, History and Preservation: The Naval Institute also has recently introduced Americans at War, a living history of Americans at war in their own words and from their own experiences. These 90-second vignettes convey powerful stories of inspiration, pride, and patriotism. Take a look at the collection, and you'll see it's not limited to accounts from those who served on ships at sea, members of the other branches are well-represented. I'm fortunate to have met USNI's Mary Ripley, she's responsible for the institute's oral history program (and she's the daughter of the late John Ripley, whose story is told here). She also deserves much credit for their blog. ("We're not the Navy nor any government agency. Blog and comment freely.") We met at a milblog conference - Mary knew (and I would come to realize) that milbloggers are the 21st-century version of exactly what the US Naval Institute is all about. Once that light bulb came on in my head, I mentioned a vague idea for a project to her - milblogs as the 21st century oral history that they are. "Put that in writing," she said (of course - see first paragraph above!) - and here's part of the result. Shortly after the first tent was pitched by the American military in Iraq a wire was connected to a computer therein, and the internet was available to a generation of Americans at war - many of whom had grown up online. From that point on, at any given moment, somewhere in Iraq a Soldier, Sailor, Airman or Marine was at a keyboard sharing the events of his or her day with the folks back home. While most would simply fire off an email, others took advantage of the (then) relatively new online blogging platforms to post their thoughts and experiences for the entire world to see. The milblog was born - and from that moment to this stories detailing everything from the most mundane aspects of camp life to intense combat action (often described within hours of the event) have been available on the web... And et cetera - but since you're reading this on a milblog, you probably knew that. And you know that milblogs aren't just blogs written by troops at war, that many friends, family members, and supporters likewise documented their story of America at war online in near-real time, as those stories developed. The diversity in membership of that group is broad, the one thing we all have in common is the impulse to make sense of the seemingly senseless, and communicate the tale - for each of us that impulse was strong enough to overcome whatever barriers prevent the vast majority of people from doing the same. Everyone at some point has some vague idea they believe should be shared - we were the people who, from some combination of internal and external urging, found and spent those many half hours persistently trying to write it down. But where will all that be in another 137 years? Or five or ten, for that matter. That's something I've asked myself since at least 2004 - when I wrote this:
Membership in the ghost battalion has grown in the years since, and an ever growing majority of those abandoned-but-still-standing sites are vanishing. Have you checked out Lt Smash's site lately? How about Sgt Hook's? If you're a long-time milblog reader you know the first widely-read milblog from Operation Iraq Freedom and the first widely-read milblog from Afghanistan are both gone from the web. If you're a relative newcomer to this world you may never even have heard of them - or the dozens upon dozens of others who carried forth the standard they set down. If you have a vague notion that something should be done about that, (a notion I've heard expressed more than once...) then you and I and the good folks at the US Naval Institute are in agreement. Preserving the history documented by the milbloggers is just one of the goals of the milblog project, the once-vague idea that we're now making real. And it's a big idea, if I say so myself - too big to explain in one simple blog post, so stand by for more. Likewise, it's too big a task to be accomplished by just one person. So if you're a milblogger (and exactly what is a milblogger? is a topic for much further discussion on its own) I'm asking for your help. All I'll really need is just a little bit (maybe just one or two of those half hours...) of your time, and your willingness to tell the tale. We've already made history, it's time to save it. (More to follow...) Posted 4:02 PM | Permalink |
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The Mudville Gazette is the on-line voice of an American warrior and his wife who stands by him. They prefer to see peaceful change render force of arms unnecessary. Until that day they stand fast with those who struggle for freedom, strike for reason, and pray for a better tomorrow.
 
 
 Furthermore, I will occasionally use satire or parody herein. The bottom line: it's my house. I like having visitors to my house. I hope you are entertained. I fight for your right to free speech, and am thrilled when you exercise said rights here. Comments and e-mails are welcome, but all such communication is to be assumed to be 1)the original work of any who initiate said communication and 2)the property of the Mudville Gazette, with free use granted thereto for publication in electronic or written form. If you do NOT wish to have your message posted, write "CONFIDENTIAL" in the subject line of your email. Original content copyright © 2003 - 2011 by Greyhawk. Fair, not-for-profit use of said material by others is encouraged, as long as acknowledgement and credit is given, to include the url of the original source post. Other arrangements can be made as needed. Contact: greyhawk at mudvillegazette dot com  Tending Distant Far from hearth and home, watching What tales we'll tell When things grim Some distant sunset, vision fading Saluting fallen friends whose names - Greyhawk, Baghdad, December 2004 |
I may have been one of the freeloaders when I first started to send trackbacks. I was just plain clueless until Jay at Stop the ACLU took the time to explain how trackbacks work to me. If I was an offender, I'm sorry - thank you for providing this open post and helping the blogosphere (and us bloggers) to thrive. Mudville is a great source of traffic.
Deborah- We were all new bloggers at one time. I am sure no one will hold an honest mistake against you.
Mr. & Mrs. Greyhawk- Thanks again for providing this forum. You guys have been a big part of helping the blogosphere in general, and my site in particular,grow. I truly appreciate it!
I know I did that recently myself. I have you on my blogroll, but I know for sure that I have posted here meaning to edit my post to add a link, then got sidetracked and never got it done.
I apologize for the times I failed to do so and promise to remember (post link first would be a good idea) in the future.
I enjoy the site, and appreciate you having the open posts.
This is a great service. Wish blogger.com allowed one so I could do it
Guilty with stupidity I guess - I thought that is what "open trackback parties" were about. Blogbursts are different. Maybe all this technology is overloading my little brain!
I've noticed a few times that linking directly to the open post sent people to a bad link. Of course, this was before you were having trackback/comment problems. What would happen is they would get sent to the post without any of the trackbacks listed. Only by going to the homepage of MG were the trackbacks displayed right in the post.
So to make sure people actually made it to the MG I started just linking to the MG homepage, so they wouldn't be confused by the bum link and leave (I received a few emails about it).
Course I tried it just now and it seems to work fine - Murphy's Law I guess..lol.
I've been an offender. I don't know how I could have beeen so clueless, I simply did not think. I found 4 since we started our blog in July and added links to our posts.
Apologies to the other bloggers and to Mr. & Mrs. G. You guys are all so generous!
New at blogging, nearly a year of rolling into mudville, keep up the good work.
Anyone who's had problems or not understand the trackback system:
I use HaloScan commenting, which has an option for sending trackback pings on its site. But for vanilla Blogger users, you can also use WizBang's standalone trackback pinger, which can be found here:
WizBang's TrackBack Pinger
It's pretty self-explanatory -- just fill in the blanks. Put a link to the Open Post permalink in your post, then use the TrackBack URL (click "Trackbacks" to find it) in the appropriate slot on WizBang.
Hope this helps.
After all the traffic you've sent me, I must apologize. The few times that I have used the Open Post, I'm pretty sure that the majority of them I did not link back to the Open Post.
I did not know the fine line rules of ettiquette in the matter, and for that I do sincerely apologize. I'm posting at my site now to define the matter, but I will not be tracking back to here because I have no intention of bumping anyone while I just restate your point.
I have to appologize that I have not included a link in my recent trackback posts, will remember it next time....
Hey Greyhawk(s)! Thanks so much for the Open Posts. They get folks reading my blog that otherwise would never find me. I for one appreciate it immensely. I owe ya a least one beer the next time we tell each other lies around a campfire somewhere.
Editor's Note: re-added after accidental deletion
Guilty as charged, I won't let it happen again.
My name is Ron Ridderhoff. I just like to say that your website is absoulutely brilliant and I know people keep on saying this but it really in truly is!