In the past, I would list blogs linking to MountainRunner according to Technorati, but Technorati is useless, ignoring links caught by Google Alerts. instead, I’ll list books citing the blog. After the fold are some of the top referring sites to MountainRunner for the month of February.

Books citing MountainRunner.us:

In The Strongest Tribe: War, Politics, and the Endgame in Iraq, Bing West cited an interview with Major General Douglas Stone: Battle of the Minds: an interview with Major General Douglas Stone.

In Change for America: A Progressive Blueprint for the 44th President, Doug Wilson cited the post From the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy: no one in PD conducts PD overseas.

In Information Operations–Doctrine and Practice: A Reference Handbook, Chris Paul cited DOD as our public diplomat in Pakistan.

In Enlisting Madison Avenue: The Marketing Approach to Earning Popular Support in Theaters of Operation, Todd Helmus, Chris Paul, and Russell Glenn also cited DOD as our public diplomat in Pakistan.

Continue reading “Citing MountainRunner
“ →

I’ve heard from several that they weren’t able to submit comments. I’m exploring this. My testing found that after hitting submit, it does take a long time for the blog to receive the comment, but it does. I’ll continue testing but if you’re encountering this problem, please email me and let me know.

I’ll be at a weekend retreat discussing public diplomacy, so no posting until Sunday night at the earliest. Enjoy your weekend and be sure to catch (and comment on) these posts:

• Wanted: an Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy
• Public Diplomacy is not Public Relations
• Persuasive politics: Revisit the Smith-Mundt Act (op-ed in The Washington Times)
• In-sourcing Stabilization and Reconstruction from Jan 3, 2008

And in the spirit of P.W. Singer’s excellent book, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, that deserves a review post here, a look back at some of my posts on the subject for your entertainment:

• Unintended Consequences of Armed Robots in Modern Conflict (Oct 19, 2007)
• The Strategic Communication of Unmanned Warfare (June 1, 2008)
• Combat Robots and Perception Management in the May/June 2008 issue of Serviam
• Robots on the Radio: interviews with Arkin, Asaro, and Armstrong on warbots (June 20, 2008)

And if you want still more on unmanned warfare, check out ACORN.

Three more books worth mentioning are:

• new! Tom Barnett’s very good book, Great Powers: America and the World After Bush, which also deserves a review post
• new! Mike Tanji’s (editor) Threats in the Age of Obama; selfish promotion: my chapter is "Arming for the Second War of Ideas", in which, before you write your comment, I do write the "war of ideas" is a misleading label that our goals must be more than countering violent extremism
• Routledge Handbook of Public Diplomacy, by Nancy Snow and Phil Taylor (editors); my chapter is "Operationalizing Public Diplomacy"
• see also this list

Continue reading “Recommended Reading While I’m Offline for a Few Days
“ →

Blogging will be slow and/or superficial the next two weeks due to the upcoming Smith-Mundt Symposium. I’ll be in DC this week (Jan 5+) for the media roundtable (and other meetings) and again next week (Jan 12+) for the Symposium itself (and other meetings).

As 2008 comes to close, here’s the year-end traffic report for the blog as reported by GoogleAnalytics:

165,818 visits
277,748 page views
1.68 average pages / visit
2min 9sec was the average visit

Over 20% of the visits came from DC, Virginia, and Maryland. Internationally, nearly 8% of the visitors came from Asia, including 1.4% from Western Asia, including Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey and 1.5% from Southern Asia, which includes Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India.

Referring sites sent 82,205 visitors via 1,679 sources, including Danger Room (4.4%), Small Wars Journal (3.3%), Abu Muqawama (1.5%), Information Dissemination (1.1%), + TPM Barnett, ZenPundit, Half of the Spear, State’s DipNote, Life After Jerusalem, and Winds of Change each contributed between 0.75 and 0.44% of the total. Interestingly, more traffic came from Facebook (0.42%)  than from USC’s Center for Public Diplomacy (0.39%).

Another tool shows nearly 4k more visitors and more than 9k more page views and that 13% of the traffic came from Asia, 12.5% from Europe.

In December there were between 820-870 readers subscribing to the RSS, a number that has been steadily growing. The actual number varies by day (824 on 12/30 but 872 on 12/18) and includes aggregators that appear as one but actually represent one or more consumers. Over 120 of these subscribers receive complete posts via email.

Thanks for reading.

Starting midweek, I’ll exchange the “cold” of Los Angeles for the cold of D.C. but only for a few days. While I won’t be posting, I’ll be on email and working on two writing projects and the Smith-Mundt Symposium.

Speaking of the Smith-Mundt Symposium, be sure to participate in the community of interest site to discuss the Act and the Symposium. Also registration for the Symposium is different than registering for the blog. You should do both…

Possible upcoming events related to the symposium include a media roundtable and follow-on discussions. Stay tuned over here.

Immediately prior to the DC trip last week, my hard drive decided to start skipping a beat. I’ve reinstalled most of the applications I want and most of the data has been restored, so posting and other work can continue.

If you’ve ever replaced a hard drive you’ll know that it’s not fun. I don’t necessarily mind upgrading to a new system, but replacing a drive is really a pain, especially when the backups fail because of bad sectors.

I have a Dell and the support has been generally pretty good. This laptop has been pretty good, but it did replace a one-month old lemon a while back. The lemon was itself a replacement for a 3.5yr old laptop that went through two (or three?) system boards, two CPUs, three hard drives, two screens, and a keyboard. If I hadn’t refused to replace the exterior shell, it would have been a completely new machine instead of the obviously well-worn and travelled device it really was (nevermind the existential question of what “it” was considering all the new parts).

Anyways, back in business after a productive trip. Good news to follow.

Off to D.C. tomorrow for a few days so talk amongst yourselves.

In the meantime, be sure to read these posts:

• Arming for the Second War of Ideas: the Department of Global Affairs
• STATE DEPARTMENT, Public Law 402 80th Congress (VOICE OF AMERICA)
• Report: The "militarization" of diplomacy exists and is accelerating
• American Public Diplomacy Wears Combat Boots: the Pentagon’s $300 million to "engage and inspire"
• Principles of Strategic Communication (Updated)
• Blogging on Public Diplomacy: the UK in the USA
• and this intelligent comment on my criticism of 4GW (which does require some cleanup).

Or buy these books:

• Routledge Handbook of Public Diplomacy paperback @ $49.95 from Routledge (h/t KAE) or the slightly more expensive version from Amazon. 
• The Al Jazeera Effect: How the New Global Media Are Reshaping World Politics by Phil Seib (review forthcoming)
• The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khana
• War and Diplomacy: From World War I to the War on Terrorism edited by Andrew Dorman and Greg Kennedy (review forthcoming)
• Losing Arab Hearts and Minds: The Coalition, Al Jazeera and Muslim Public Opinion by Steve Tatham (see review here)

Plus lots of other interesting posts can be found in the archives.

Lastly, checkout the new blog on the block: SOUTHCOM Commander’s Blog by Admiral Jim Stavridis.

There may be an issue with the new voting feature on the blog. The screenshots below are a) not signed in (note the color of the star…no visible hyperlink under vote), b) signed in (note the color of the star…no visible hyperlink), and after clicking on the “x Vote(s)” text (note the checkmark in the star…still no underline indicating a hyperlink).

Can you go through the same sequence? I’ve heard from some that you can sign in but you cannot vote. I’ve tested this on IE 8, Firefox 3, and Google’s Chrome (my new favorite browser). One issue I have seen: after voting, the spinning dial icon that appears (or whatever it’s called) doesn’t go away until the page is refreshed and only then does the vote count increment.

MountainRunner got a make-over. The fresh look and feel will make the site easier to use and the new features should help make MountainRunner your first stop for information on public diplomacy and strategic communication.

The “community features” of MovableType 4.2 will become more noticeable as I roll-out capabilities over the coming weeks. In the meantime, here is a short list of enhancements available now:

• Login to make commenting easier and to access new and forthcoming features. With the update, some of bugs in commenting (signed in but not signed in is one I experienced) are gone.
  
• If you like a post, give it a vote to promote it. To vote, you have to register and sign in. Sorry, there is no thumbs down feature.
  
• There are certain key concepts to this blog. Now, instead of searching blog posts, one click will get you to the resource page on the subject.
  

The new MountainRunner will incorporate the repository aspect of ConflictWiki (http://conflictwiki.org) that never got off the ground. Soon you’ll see a link on the right side for a new repository of reports and book lists on public diplomacy, strategic communication, information operations, etc.

One last item. On the left margin of the blog, you may also have noticed a new image. The logo is for my firm, Armstrong Strategic Insights Group (note the mountain; no runner though). For more, visit the still-developing site http://armstrongsig.com. Longer white papers will be published from ASIG with an accompanying post on the MountainRunner blog.

I will be in DC Sunday through Wednesday next week for a 1.5 day seminar at the George C. Marshall Conference Center and an event at Brookings. Accordingly, posting will be light if not non-existent.

A quick note to say the comments are re-enabled. While this blog isn’t known for having lots of comments (offline discussions are far more numerous the online), I saw that several readers tried and failed to post comments recently. Please retry for the benefit of all readers.

Recent posts looking for comments:

• Question: who is the next…
• Debating in the New Media: State Department dialogues with Ahmadinejad’s media advisor
• For Wed the 17th: Blogger Roundtable with Under Secretary James Glassman

I noticed a couple of readers tried to comment but couldn’t. The comment script apparently went rogue so my host shut it down. I have confidence that the host, who supports this MovableType installation, will resolve the issue quickly. This is probably related to the 4.2.1 MT upgrade performed next week.

Related, the 4.2.1 upgrade included some features I’ve been waiting for to re-launch ConflictWiki. More immediately, the reading lists that include recommended Public Diplomacy, Strategic Communication, and Information Operations-related books and reports will be going up sooner than later under an easier access paradigm that not only allows searching, commenting, and excerpts, but user-submitted content as well.

Between a deadline and a conference outside of D.C. next week, there will be little to no blogging the week of 7 July 2008.  Email access will, as a result of the conference, be restricted, so expect a delay if you email. 

For my American readers: I hope you had a Happy Fourth of July.  For my British readers, stop pretending you’re happy to be rid of us.  For everybody, this is a good time to (re)read America’s first and best public diplomacy document, now 232 years old: 

Also, check out the podcast version of the blog produced by Odigo.  A computer reads the posts, not me… let me know what you think.

Tech geek alert!  You may want to jump to the second paragraph…

If you noticed the blog loads faster in your browser, you’re not enjoying the benefits of a beefed up Internet architecture (this is the U.S. after all).  No, I removed some reporting code from the site.  I was toying with both Google Analytics (GA) and Sitemeter (SM) to track site usage.  A sort of long term bake-off.  Neither product really gave me a full picture of what was up.  GA required javascript on your side to collect data, while SM could fall back to using an offsite image if javascript was unavailable.  Either way, neither gave me a complete picture and underrepresented actual visits.  So, I dumped the code for both this morning and, at least for me, the site loads faster. 

End alert, keep reading…

With the usage reports I was using undercounting visitors, reports based on the web servers logs must be in error in the other direction because they’re so much higher.  For the last three months, April – June 2008, my web server reported a daily average of 4,483 visitors (4510, 4797, 4142 respectively) who averaged 1.9 page views. 

Daily page views can seemingly vary widely.  For example, in June 2008, pages per day averaged 8,351 but there was a spike to 14,663 on the 14th (this unspectacular post went up on the 14th). 

When asked, I tell people I have somewhere around 1,000 daily readers (my thinking: 300-600 daily visits GA and SM reported + nearly 700 RSS subscribers, knowing there was overlap).  Not sure I’ll start saying that I have over 4k daily daily readers though.  These numbers just don’t seem right. 

Now, back to work…

I will be in DC next week for several meetings and a visit to the Foreign Service Institute.  Posting will thus be light, but there should be at least one that should be of interest. 

Other commitments and travel have imposed themselves on my blogging ritual.  Look for a slew of posts today followed by quiet as I travel to D.C. for two days. 

In the meantime, from the blog of a notable public relations / strategic communication firm commercial.  Question: is this a) Victoria Secret commercial, b) an ad for soccer/football gear, c) a World Cup promotion, or d) none of the above?

Know your demographic.  Is this targeting the mass audience or a slice of the audience?  The ad may not entirely successful on its own — 10min after you watched the video can you recall the promoted brand? — but does it fit inside a larger campaign?  More later, not on the commercial but on precision marketing.

CAPTCHA, those little hard to read letters and numbers used to prevent comment spam, is now enabled on this blog.  So you may comment as a registered user through the blog (the MovableType option), TypeKey, OpenID, LiveJournal, VOX, and now anonymously.  CAPTCHA only appears for users in the last group, anonymous. 

Just so you know, all comments are immediately posted on the website, including the anonymously written comments. 

Have a good weekend / hope you had a good weekend.

This is a quick and dirty post to highlight some additions to the blogroll, posts you should read, and a shameless self-promotion.

New Blogs to Read

• The Complex Terrain Laboratory is a work in progress (official launch is 1 September 2008) based in the U.K. and with contributions from both sides of the pond.
• Insurgency Research Group is exactly what its name says and is a spin-off from the Kings of War. In addition to its regular posts, it provides a good wrap-up of UK-specific COIN news. KCL seems to have really adopted this blogging thing…
• Ubiwar (“conflict in n dimensions”) is Tim Stevens’ blog, one of an increasingly visible cadre of PhD students from King’s College.
• Don Vandergriff has a namesake blog focusing on the human elements of modern conflict.
• Arabic Media Shack is on because, well, I don’t read Arabic and even if I did, it’s nice to have an aggregator that gives comments.
• In Harmonium is friend Marc Tyrrell’s blog. Marc’s an anthropologist who posts infrequently, but he said he’ll increase the frequency (maybe this will help encourage him).
• Avuncular American where Gerry Loftus, a retired Foreign Service Officer (24 years), comments on world events as seen by an expatriate in Europe.

Recent Posts (of others) to Note

• READ: Pat Kushlis’s Radio Free What?
• Winds of Change linked to the Task Force 134 Strategic Communications plan. 
• Marc’s post Rhetoric vs. Reality is a comment on the Anthro v Mil debates noted recently in Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency: to some, a natural pairing, to others, not so much (I’ve had Marcus Griffin’s blog, From an Anthropological Perspective, linked for a while, but he went dark, so Marc fills a void.)

Not posts, but you should still read from Military Review:

• The Al-Qaeda Media Machine by Philip Seib, USC Annenberg professor of Journalism and Public Diplomacy.
• The Story Behind the National Security Act of 1947 by Charles A. Stevenson, an expert on American civil-military relations, Secretaries of Defense, and the NSA of 1947.
• The Most Important Thing: Legislative Reform of the National Security System by James R. Locher III. (Both Charlie and Jim are at PNSR and work on NSA 1947.)

And lastly, a shout out to myself:

MountainRunner is not just on the short blogroll of the U.S. State Department, but also on the Swedish Institute’s blogroll. SI is, by the way, Sweden’s public diplomacy agency. If you’re interested in public diplomacy, I suggest you visit SI’s webpage on public diplomacy and read their operational focus and definition of public diplomacy. More on Swedish public diplomacy to appear in the blog sooner than later (which fits in with their purpose to increase awareness of Sweden).