It's an open secret that the US intelligence community has its own classified, highly secure Internet. Called Intelink, it's got portals, chat rooms, message boards, search engines, webmail, and tons of servers. It's pretty damn cool … for four years ago.
Encourage blogging on Intelink. When I Google "Afghanistan blog" on the public Internet, I find 1.1 million entries and tons of useful information. But on Intelink there are no blogs. Imagine if the experts in every intelligence field were turned loose - all that's needed is some cheap software. It's not far-fetched to picture a top-secret CIA blog about al Qaeda, with postings from Navy Intelligence and the FBI, among others. Leave the bureaucratic infighting to the agency heads. Give good analysts good tools, and they'll deliver outstanding results.
Wired Magazine: We Need Spy Blogs
:: Captain Alexander is right on. Two things seem obvious to me:
1. Blogging is the new peer review. The blogsphere provides for a huge open source resource for fact checking and BS detection. Just ask Dan Rather.
2. You can't be a Subject Matter Expert on any topic these days if you're not reading the blogs on said subject. When talking to any "expert," try asking them what their favorite RSS feed on the topic is... If they give you a puzzled look, and ask you what RSS is... Find yourself a new expert!
We need more blogs.
Why aren't more CAP units blogging? (Squadrons? Groups? Wings?)
I have to give credit to the Executive Director for giving it the old college try. Just think about how our progress could be accelerated if we used this cheap and proven tool to make what happens up the chain of command less opaque.
Air Force Link would work much better as a blog.
How about Mission blogs?
Imagine how much easier it would be for us to collaborate with other agencies if we had someone working for the IC... blogging clues, progress, plans, and status... in real time during a SAR mission, on a secure extranet.
The Information Officer could release accurate and timely information to the press, as well as squash rumors and provide rebuttal to inaccurate reporting.... via a public mission blog.
Is anyone doing this? If not... why the hell not?
I'm currently setting up a blog for my squadron, and once I've done that I will probably move onto setting one up for CAWGCadets.org. So the idea is out there, and I would love to see others doing it too. Anybody know of squadrons that already have blogs? I would love to see what people have done so I can get ideas and hopefully avoid pitfalls I'm sure to make. If you want to see what I've done so far, check out http://grant.henninger.name/sq56/ It isn't done, and has few updates, but you can get the idea. Right now I need to write some sort of how-to so others in my squadron can post some stories before we bring the site live.
So, does anybody have any examples of good squadron blogs or advice on mine? Oh, and please don't pass around the link, since it is not the official site I don't want people going to my work in progress and getting a bad impression of my unit.
Posted by: Grant Henninger | March 10, 2005 at 11:51
CB, I want to have a blog active for our upcoming spring encampment. The idea is to have a realtime source of what is happening at the encampment for family and friends of the participants and then for "historical" purposes have the info held in archives for all to refer to as they wish.
I wanted to do it for last year's but lacked the expertise. Nevertheless, from your postings it appears to much more easy to do than I thought - so I'm going to try and give it a shot. If we get something up and go live we'll link with CAPBlog....
Posted by: pjh7 | March 10, 2005 at 12:04
I had the same idea for my little freight terminal, but it's like talking to a brick wall. "Blog? Whazzat?" "You want to install what kind of software on the server?" "Huh?"
Insane. I ended up making a blog-like page in html and updating it manually.
I was concerned about privacy since we wanted to display names, ranks, events, etc. Otherwise I would have upgraded my typepad subscription and just run it off there.
Posted by: Ian | March 14, 2005 at 05:38
Great minds think alike Captain!
Funny you should mendtion that... because Six Apart actually has listed the USAF as a cutomer, using TypePad.
(I'm sorry, I can't remember where I saw that, I think it may have been the WSJ.)
;)
Posted by: CAPblogger | March 14, 2005 at 09:44
Why not have blogs on Intelink? Well, "need to know" comes to mind.
Posted by: Louis | March 17, 2005 at 15:01
Need to know leads to stovepiping of info which leads to smoking holes in the ground where the world trade center used to be.
Kris
Posted by: kris alexander | April 09, 2005 at 23:36
Time to add another blog to the log!
Flying Minutemen have touched down to bring Air Force Auxiliarists meaningful content on current issues as well as aggregated newsfeeds from popular CAP focused blogs.
Guess who is our favorite?
*ahem*cb*ahem*
Posted by: Flying Minuteman | July 07, 2005 at 18:22
Hello, I've been looking all over the internet for this info, I just can not find a list of installations (with ICAO), aircraft type and squadron number w/ squadron type. I can also not find any combination of the above.
Why may I need this info? I'm making a Virtual Civil Air Patrol under a seperate name and need this info to make a list of authorized arrival and departure airports as well as being able to insert this info into a artificial economy. Any help is really appreciated.
Posted by: Jerry Jacobs | March 18, 2006 at 12:31
sorry about that wrong area new to the site
Posted by: Jerry Jacobs | March 18, 2006 at 12:31