My friend Jon Garfunkel is doing some research on milblogs. Naively thinking that milblogs were about the authentic voice of soldiers, I thought it would be edifying to check a few out. To my horror and outrage (or was it “shock and awe” – President Bush’s favorite weapon against the citizens of his own country…?), the first thing I found was that milblogs were being brought under the arm of the vast U.S. military PR campaign. Taking a page out of the Wal-Mart book, U.S. Central Command has been cultivating bloggers as part of a viral marketing strategy to drive traffic to CENTCOM’s own web site. It’s certainly a lot easier to push a message if all the buzzy-bees come to you! And if that doesn’t work, the military has a project to create the illusion of American support to fall back on.