WHILE Israel fights Hezbollah with tanks and aircraft, its supporters are campaigning on the internet.Israel's Government has thrown its weight behind efforts by supporters to counter what it believes to be negative bias and a tide of pro-Arab propaganda. The Foreign Ministry has ordered trainee diplomats to track websites and chatrooms so that networks of US and European groups with hundreds of thousands of Jewish activists can place supportive messages.
In the past week nearly 5,000 members of the World Union of Jewish Students (WUJS) have downloaded special "megaphone" software that alerts them to anti-Israeli chatrooms or internet polls to enable them to post contrary viewpoints. A student team in Jerusalem combs the web in a host of different languages to flag the sites so that those who have signed up can influence an opinion survey or the course of a debate.
Jonny Cline, of the international student group, said that Jewish students and youth groups with their understanding of the web environment were ideally placed to present another side to the debate.
Dozens of similar examples of insider editing came to light last week through WikiScanner, a new Web site that traces the source of millions of changes to Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia that anyone can edit.- NY Times
The biggest growth in the news sector comes from what the report calls "nontraditional news outlets." This is a category that includes portals and search engines (Google News), aggregators (Digg), aggregators with attitude (the Drudge Report), bloggers (Daily Kos), and community sites (Gothamist). All featured soaring growth rates; Digg's was so substantial the report's authors had to leave it off one their charts.