What You Should Be Reading! (Blog List)

A few weeks ago, I asked ... well ... everyone: "What are you reading?"  I had noticed, with some dismay, that my own list of intel-related blogs and sources was a bit outdated and contained a number of now dead links.

Fortunately, my colleagues on LinkedIn, friends and acquaintances from a number of intelligence related email lists and the loyal (long-suffering?) readers of SAM were able to fill the void.  Without further ado, below is the list of all the blogs and other sources we managed to accumulate:



I asked my research assistant, McKenzie Rowland, to organize all the notes and emails and comments into a single user-friendly spreadsheet. We sorted the sites by how often they were mentioned by different people. There were lots of ties, though, so don't take the order too literally. 

Since I sent the announcement to all three of the major intelligence communities (National security, business and law enforcement), McKenzie also included a brief description of what we thought was the primary audience of the blog. We were lucky enough to get a number of non-US sources as well. 

Finally, I do not consider this list exhaustive. If YOUR favorite blog/source on intel didn't make the list, please leave a comment or drop me a note at kwheaton at mercyhurst dot edu!

Iran: A Nation Of Bloggers (Vancouver Film School via Information Aesthetics)

Information Aesthetics recently highlighted a short YouTube film by the Vancouver Film School titled Iran: A Nation Of Bloggers. I am not sure where they got their facts but even if they are off by half, the film suggests a changing political dynamic in Iran. I know, I know, we have heard it all before but it reminds me a bit of the importance of the fax machine during perestroika...

The President Is A Blogger! (Whitehouse.gov/blog)

OK, maybe it is not the president, just the White House, but there is something there that has not been there before -- a blog!

SAM Goes Back To School, Part 3: Blogs Of Note

There are a million great blogs out there so the list below is obviously incomplete. I have selected these blogs based on largely internal criteria - you may well disagree. I am also sure that I have forgotten somebody -- so forgive me as well. In this case, please do not hesitate to post your own favorite site in the comments or drop me an email.

The Basics: Secrecy News, Danger Room and Google News Alert for "Intelligence". OK, OK; these are mostly focused on US national security intelligence rather than intelligence writ large. The facts remain that 60-70% of our students, at least, go to work for a three letter agency and the 50-60 billion the US drops on intel each year dwarfs every other intel program in the world. Secrecy News, sponsored by the Federation Of American Scientists, is probably the most respected intelligence watchdog out there. Wired's Danger Room is interesting, eclectic and very widely read. Finally, while you will get many false positives, all intel studies students ought to have an alert set up with some news service (I use Google's News Alerts on the keyword "intelligence".

The Experts: Haft Of The Spear, IntelFusion, Soob, Analyst's Corner, The Dark Visitor, Risk, Uncertainty and Everything Else and much of the blogroll. Michael Tanji posts occasionally to Wired's Danger Room but if you want all of his good thinking you have to go to his site, Haft Of The Spear (affectionately known as HOTS). Jeff Carr over at Intelfusion is another blogger worth listening to. His recent OSINT project should generate some pretty cool results. Deborah Osborne's Analyst's Corner is a unique resource for crime and law enforcement analysts. The Dark Visitor is about Chinese hackers and if that interests you, then this is the best place to learn more about it. Finally, Professor William McGill explores the scientific aspects of intelligence at Risk Uncertainty and Everything Else. There are others in the blogroll (in the column to the right) worth checking out as well.

The Techies. Ars Technica, TechCrunch, Gizmodo, and ReadWriteWeb. All of these blogs cover technology in one fashion or another but each has its own specialty. I like Ars for its commentary on the way technology and society mix. TechCrunch covers the business of technology while Gizmodo focuses almost exclusively on gadgets and new applications of technology. ReadWriteWeb is all about web applications and fills in some of the gaps left by the other three.

Resource Blogs: Docuticker, Information Aesthetics, MakeUseOf, and Lifehacker. All of these blogs provide resources for getting stuff done. Docuticker provides links to many articles and studies of interest (I get a lot of the links in the Shared Items column at the right from Docuticker). Information Aesthetics is all about data visualization and is very good at providing new ideas or tools for making more compelling graphics. MakeUseOf is a web tools site with lots of tips, etc. for getting more out of the internet. Finally, the granddaddy of them all, Lifehacker, with tips, tricks and useful tools for just about everything.

College Blogs. Wise Bread, Hack College and Mind Hacks. Wise Bread is all about living on the cheap while Hack College is specifically targeted at helping students get through college. Mind Hacks is not truly a college blog but I always find good tips about how to study or analyze problems there.

Fun Stuff: Boing Boing, Rocketboom, Indexed, Ill Doctrine and Alexia Golez. These are some of the blogs I turn to when I need a break from work. Not all of it is for everybody but there is almost always something interesting on one of them.

Mercyhurst Student Blogs: The 19th Hole, GiRl SpY, Justin's Space and NewRisks. Student blogs are not as widely read as some of the others on this list but there are some very good ones out there. The 19th Hole covers a wide range of international issues while GiRl SpY covers the subject of women in intelligence with a unique and very personal voice. Justin's Space is a varied mix of interesting topics while the excellent NewRisks blog seems to have gone silent (Let's hope for its return soon!).

The Internationals: Silendo (Italian), Konkurrenzanalyse 2.0 (German), George C. Dimitriou (Greek), Inteligencia Competitiva (Brazilian), and Renseignement & Intelligence économique (French). We get quite a few international students and it is good to know that there are bloggers on every continent talking intelligently about intelligence. This is also good practice for students in various language programs. Me, I just use Ubiquity's translate feature...

As I mentioned earlier, I am sure I have forgotten some of the very best. Either post them to the comments or drop me note and I will make sure they get posted.

Previous Posts (SAM Goes Back To School):
Part 1: Wake Up!
Part 2: Top Firefox Add-Ons

Changes To SAM (Feedback Welcome!)

Astute readers of SAM will note that I have been moving stuff around over the last several weeks on the blog. I have added a couple of new features and shifted stuff around based on my perceptions of your (the reader's) interests. I would welcome any feedback you might have...

All the posts will remain on the left-hand side of the page. I added the Madkast feature a while back to make it easier for readers to share the posts. For example, about 18 people used Madkast to share the post about Dan Mulligan returning from Iraq. It also gives some useful statistics on the top three stories on any given day so it seems like a good tool for the both of us.

I know I use a tons of tags and the tag list has gotten pretty long. Blogger won't let me edit the list in a useful way. I am pretty sure, however, that this is the way some of the search engine spiders find the site, so I probably will continue to use tags even though they don't seem to be of too much use to individual readers.

The right hand column of the blog is where things have changed most, though. The biggest problem I have is deciding what to put at the top of that column. I am well aware that many people don't scroll down so the space "above the fold" (to use an old newspaper term), or above the bottom of the screen, is prime real estate. I really want the most useful stuff up at the top and the admin or lesser stuff at the bottom.

Right now I have two features that I like but am considering moving down the list. The first is "Save Page As PDF". This is a "nice to have" feature in my estimation. It does nothing for me but I have seen where other bloggers recommend it as a useful tool for readers. On any given day a number of you use it but it does not seem to be too terribly popular. Not sure it belongs at the top of the column but I am pretty sure that if I move it below the fold, then no one will use it all.

I also have a capability to subscribe to the blog via email using RSSFwd. This allows people to get the posts sent straight to their email accounts. I am assuming that this is a useful feature for some people. The service gives me no feedback so I have no way of knowing.

I have added a feature by AideRSS that I really like that keeps a running tab of the top five stories in a given week. It calculates what is a "top" post through a complicated algorithm that includes the number of comments on, links to and bookmarks of a certain post. Since I try to post every day and sometimes two or three times a day, things come and go pretty fast. For those people who only check the blog once a week or so, this seems to be a good way to check out what has been posted -- well, what has been posted and popular at any rate. I like AideRSS because it is really simple to use and provides me with detailed feedback on which posts people are reading. That lets me craft future posts. Again, a tool that seems to be working for me and for you.

My favorite new feature is SAM's Shared Items which is function of Google Reader. I began using Google Reader recently as my RSS feed reader. I had been using the live bookmarks feature of Firefox but once I got to 60 daily RSS feeds, I knew it was time to migrate to a reader. I wish I had done it sooner. Google provides a whole host of tools for making feed reading faster and more useful. One of the neatest tools is the ability to share certain articles with other people. Google does this by letting you designate the article and then it creates a shared items website for your stuff. Since it is a website, it also puts off its own RSS feed, which makes it trivially easy to add a widget to a blog to get the feed to dump anywhere you want.

The net effect is that I go through 60 feeds a day (300-400 items), cull the ones that I think are the best or most interesting and then share them through the SAM's Shared Items box on the blog. I see much more good stuff than I can write posts about and this makes it easy to get this good stuff on the site. All this, hopefully, makes for one stop shopping for you. It is a new feature but I am already starting to see some activity with it.

I really like Top Posts This Week and SAM's Shared Items because they are dynamic. One will change more slowly than the blog itself (Top Posts This Week) and one will change more quickly than the blog (SAM's Shared Items). I like the symmetry...

The next thing is the Mercyhurst Student Projects. These are impressive projects that I have talked about on the blog. I would like to get these even higher up the page but they don't change very often.

The Intelligence News feature is another section I have considered deleting. It is just a Google News feed based on the word "intelligence". It is dynamic and I like that but the results (particularly, as I am told, in foreign countries) are not always very relevant.

Links of Interest is my blogroll and it is not going anywhere. These are almost all people who have supported me or helped as I got this blog set up. Cheers to you all!

The rest of the left hand column is stuff about me and admin stuff (like the archive and the tag list). Personally, my instincts are too be much more private but I understand the issue of credibility in the blogosphere. If I am not willing to share some details about myself (particularly when I am pretty easy to find anyway), why should anyone put any stock in what I have to say? As a result of this logic and a strong belief in online publishing for academics, I am putting as many of my papers on Scribd as possible and intend to try to make much more of my content freely available on this site. I hope, for example, in the next 6 months or so, to come out with a revised edition of The Warning Solution and make it freely available here for download.

All this is probably a bit more detail than you needed but that's why I saved it for Saturday! I, of course, will be interested in any feedback.

Every Blog Has Its Day: Politically-interested Internet Users' Perceptions of Blog Credibility (Journal Of Computer Mediated Communication)

The results of an interesting study were recently published in the online Journal of Computer Mediated Communication on how readers view the credibility of blogs. Here are some highlights:

"This study hypothesized that politically-interested Web users will judge blogs as credible sources of news and information. The results indicate that politically-interested Internet users find blogs to be moderately credible sources for news and information. Past analyses have detected similar findings for blogs (Banning & Trammell, 2006; Johnson & Kaye, 2004) and for the Internet as a whole (Johnson & Kaye, 2000, 2002). While Internet users are increasingly flocking to blogs as a source of political news and information, the moderate scores for credibility indicate that users also realize that blogs are not the final word..."

"As expected, respondents evaluated blogs as highly credible for depth of information, while judging them as weaker on credibility for fairness of information..."

"In fact, blog supporters perceive bias as a strength that allows for a more detailed and in depth examination of issues. Although this intensity of analysis is valued, it may also suggest that blog readers are attracted to sites that share their viewpoints and therefore have a potentially polarizing effect..."

"Heavy users viewed blogs as more credible overall than did light blog users. This perception extended to all four measures of credibility (believability, fairness, accuracy, depth of information)..."

"Politically-interested blog users judged blogs as considerably more credible overall than traditional media or other online sources. Interestingly, broadcast television fared the worst on measures of credibility..."

"As hypothesized, both reliance and motivations were predictors of blog credibility, after controlling for demographic and political variables. Reliance emerged as a stronger predictor of blog credibility than did motivations. It stands to reason that users would find their preferred media selection the most credible..."

"The current study took the examination one step further by asserting that the Informational (i.e., instrumental) motivations will be a stronger predictor of blog credibility than will entertainment motivations (i.e., habitual), after controlling for demographics and political variables. ... However, respondents who primarily engaged in blogging for entertainment purposes are less likely to judge blogs as highly credible..."

Link To Full Text