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
Lastly, a few words about who reads this blog. The number of readers on any given day, as with any blog, is hard to determine. Visitors to the site range from 450-800 depending on the day and the reporting tool. The web server logs report generally five times the number of page views as third-party reporting tools like SiteMeter and GoogleAnalytics. The RSS subscriber count from Google’s Feedburner is currently hovering around 800-850 but doesn’t include the over 130 who receive the blog through email. There are now nearly 100 Twitter subscribers. I won’t even talk about Technorati as their score is a joke and way off (too low). Then there’s the graphical representation of the visitors. The count is low, but the image gives a fairly good idea of this blog’s global readership.
