On Liveblogging
For historians (or more likely just a nerdy grandkid who does our genealogy one day), today I'll launch my first liveblog (of sorts) in probably 7 years. Briefly, the concept of the liveblog that most people are familiar with is that it's a great way of following events as they unfold in real time, the written equivalent of watching live TV coverage of an unfolding event. That's important but that's not what makes liveblogging powerful.
Liveblogging allows us to continuously gather, verify, analyze and comment on news as it unfolds. Between 2009 and 2017 I ran, at various times, liveblogs on multiple topics, but focused on Iran, Syria, Bahrain, and ultimately Ukraine and Russia. Those liveblogs allowed us to collect a tremendous amount of data, data that we then turned into analysis, analysis that put us on the cutting edge of understanding these topics. There were some large news organizations with livebloggers (the New York Times was good, Al Jazeera was better, The Guardian was best), but none of them were turning their daily work into data the way my small team of coworkers and friends were (Josh Shahryar of The Daily Nite Owl, Sam Razi from Iran News Now , Scott Lucas andJohn Horne fromEA Worldview, and of course my team at The Interpreter -- Pierre Vaux, Catherine Fitzpatrick, Michael Weiss). When an incident happened on a particular street in a particular neighborhood of Aleppo, Damascus, Kyiv, Moscow, or some random tiny village in Ukraine or Syria, we could tell you all the protests/bombings/tanks/troop movements/"massacres"/war crimes that had happened there before, and on what date. We could make patterns out of our daily work.
We did all this with almost no technology, broken computers, a budget in the low thousands, zero automation, and only vaguest idea that eventually there would be AI tools (in fact, my friends at the Institute for the Study of War, ISW, had a budget and supercomputers and our work was nearly as good, comparable, or sometimes even superior).
This is not an attempt to recreate that, though that vision remains and is in my current business plan. What this is is a stop-gap, a way for me to start informally populating a mind map of my ideas, writing, events, and observations. Where it goes only time, and money, will tell.
